In This Hollow Valley
by xxCerezasxx
Summary: AU beginning after No Rest For the Wicked. Dean wakes up on the rack to an eternity of torture at Alastair's hands. Meanwhile, Castiel and several of his brothers embark on a mission to rescue Dean from Hell. Full warnings/summary inside. D/A, D/C, D/S.
1. Chapter 1

**Rating:M**

** Pairings:Dean/Alastair, Dean/Castiel, Dean/Sam, Ruby/Lilith**

** Disclaimer:I don't own Supernatural in any way, shape, or form.**

**Summary: AU beginning after No Rest For the Wicked. Dean wakes up on the rack to an eternity of torture at Alastair's hands. Meanwhile, Castiel and several of his brothers embark on a mission to rescue Dean from Hell before he can give in and break the first seal. After forty years of fighting, Castiel reaches Dean, only to find that the righteous man is no longer righteous. Castiel resurrects Dean so that he can play his part in the coming Apocalypse. Once back on the surface, Dean has trouble adjusting to life the way everyone (himself included) expects him to. Hell changed him, and he's not so sure if he can or wants to change back.**

**Warnings: Graphic torture, noncon, dubcon, violence, blood-play, semi-graphic death of a child, mature language, some cannibalism, character deaths, and two brief instances of watersports used as religious metaphors. Please proceed at your own caution. I would not advise clicking the links below if you are uncomfortable with any of the things I have warned for; this is a graphic story only suitable for a mature audience. I've edited the worst of the fic out for this site, but still, this is not a happy or tame read.**

**This was originally posted for the SPN/J2 Big Bang 2010 over on livejournal. I am more than willing to give the link to the full version to anyone who asks. You guys have to see the art that was drawn for this story, the art is beautiful and horrific and so much better than this story could ever be.**

In This Hollow Valley

* * *

_Come little light_  
_Falling too slow-_  
_Into the darkness;_  
_Go, go, go_

_

* * *

_

The air is a harsh, wet heat heavy with the scent of sulfur, the copper of fresh and drying blood. It smells like evil, so dark and overpowering, the stench of a thousand demons, the utter odor of absolute sin, six-day-old piss left to sit in ninety-degree heat in a truck stop restroom.

The pain hits him moments afterwards. Bone-deep – no – soul-deep agony, pulsing where hooks are embedded deep into his flesh, holding him tight to the miles and miles of bloody, rusty chains expanding out into the blackness; a spider web of suffering reaching every corner and bowel of hell. _This is it_ his brain chants, even as he screams, long, panicked screams, cries for his brother and for help, for the salvation the logic portion of him knows won't come. He deserves this, he begged for this, and he flexes his bare feet, swallows hard against the fresh wave of shouts brewing low in his throat, impending yells that vibrate his vocal chords.

He sizzles alive with his fear in the dark, listening to the tormented screeches, the endless pleas, women and men sobbing somewhere he can't see, but so close he can feel them, feel their eternal misery. They howl like abused and dying dogs in the dark.

"Hello Dean." Something whispers to him, stepping out of the shadows and into the light.

He knows demons are ugly sons of bitches beneath their suits but his mind couldn't comprehend something this unearthly awful. The demon is black, black as night, black as the feathers of a crow; an inky, dead black. It has two gray ivory horns protruding from the top of its skull that curl backwards, the tips razor-sharp and jagged. It walks on goat hooves with black nails and its arms are long and thin, with claws that could put a wendigo's or Wolverine's to shame, and blood has dried to them in a thick, red crust. It's lean, and it's tall, and it hisses at him with a barbed, bruise-purple tongue that pokes between teeth serrated like a shark's. Its cock hangs obscenely between its thighs, covered in barbs and bristles, the quills of a porcupine. In all his years he's never seen anything as terrifying. It looks like a manifestation of evil, and it is, it fucking is.

"Dude, you need a facial, no, a new face. You are one ugly bastard. I don't think even your mother could love that face." He forces a laugh that feels tiny, barely causes a rattle in his chest.

"Hm, you're very funny Deano. You don't mind if I call you Deano, do you?"

"If I say I mind is it going to matter?" The sulfur in the air makes his throat burn, until it hurts to breathe, just to draw in breath after breath, mouthful after gasping choke.

"No." It chuckles, delighted; a child unwrapping its new toy. It meets his eyes with curiosity, and he can see himself being torn apart in its irises, scattered bloody across the floor.

"Who are you?"

"Who am I? Why, I'm the guy in the suit, the head honcho, the big man on campus, the guy calling the shots, I'm the boss down here, Dean. My name is Alastair." The name slithers off his tongue and goddamn if it isn't fitting, shivers traveling down his spine at just the sound, the face and name put together, into one being of pure, unadulterated malice, definitely not from concentrate. iAlastair/i, Alastair is a demon and he's in hell, so there will be no last minute exorcisms, no salt or holy water. There is nothing to save him. He doubts hope and redemption exist down here, so low beneath the ground. "Do you know why I'm here?" Alastair has a knife, a curved, silver blade, and he uses it, slices Dean's clothes away from his body, nicking the skin above his heart on the way down.

"Nope, I'm afraid I'm relatively new to how things work in hell." Alastair leans in close and he can smell his breath, the rot and the stench of it, blood and mold, twisted, dying flesh, that long, barbed, decrepit tongue. He thinks if Alastair were to lick him pieces of it would break off and fall, wriggle there on the ground.

"It's very simple Deano. I'm going to torture you today." Alastair cocks his head thoughtfully, grinning horridly in the darkness. "That's about it really; I'm going to torture you. I'm going to torture you day after day, until you're broken, and then I'm going to break you again. Any questions?"

"No." His voice dies in his throat, and the sound that emerges from his throat is barely a whisper, nothing more than a hoarse exhalation.

"Let's begin, shall we?"

Alastair sinks the knife into the soft flesh of his exposed belly.

* * *

He is light.

He is made from light. His entire being is constructed from it, shining brighter than the sun. God is the sun and God is light and God is the stars. He is part of his father; a tiny, shimmering piece of his creator's soul.

"Castiel." Uriel is bright too, golden and gleaming, glass-sharp luminous feathers reflecting sun. His own wings shine with silver beams from the moon, feathers dancing in the breeze that ruffles them. He can't feel the wind but he can see it, see the fluttering of his and Uriel's feathers, the clouds being pushed gracefully across the sky. "We have a mission, the entire garrison."

"What is it?"

"We're to rescue a soul from hell. We must leave immediately."

"Whose soul?" He wonders what man or woman can be worthy of this salvation. They have never been called upon to pull someone from perdition.

"Dean Winchester. Come, it's time to go." He follows Uriel, casts one, long glance back at the brightness of heaven and steps past the gates.

He falls from heaven and it is exhilarating; he plummets, falling faster and faster, his wings cutting through the sky as he spirals downward. His brothers are on either side of him and they descend together, shining. Earth is dim beneath them, but Castiel can see every inch of it, all of the world; the mountains and the glaciers, each ripple in the sea.

Down, down, down he soars and he thinks of Dean Winchester, a man who he is going to pluck from the very folds of hell, the darkest, foulest recesses of the universe. He can see Dean's memories and he sorts through them, listens to the endless eternity of his thoughts.

_Goodnight Sammy._

_I love you mom._

_Please, be proud of me. Look at me like that too._

_There is no God._

_I don't want to die._

_Love me…look….please….I'm not…you don't understand…no…take me….too…I…Sam.._

Dean's thoughts fly by and he sees the story of Dean's life in the sky, flashing before him. Dean who wanted a puppy and received a little brother instead, Dean who wanted to be a fireman once, Dean who just wanted to live to be forty, Dean who wanted to die before his brother, Dean who stopped wanting, who stopped needing, who gave and gave, stripped his very soul bare until there was _nothing_ left, until he was a hollow, empty shell and death was a relief.

The last moment of Dean's life and Castiel tastes the salt of his blood and soft resignation; feels the intensity of pain and _aches_. Dean is being torn apart and there is nothing, only blood on his lips, blood pooling in the open cavern of his chest. Dean watches the florescent light twirl yellow across the ceiling and in the furthest corner of his mind, mouse timid and quiet is _I tried_. _You tried Dean Winchester_ Castiel says, though Dean can't hear him, whispers to himself as he stares through the salted iron bars of hell's gates into the blackness, the crackles of gray lightning far below.

* * *

Dean's memories are precious. They are invaluable sources of insight into Dean's character, remarkable in their depths. They offer Castiel an opportunity to study this soul, a true hero lost in a world of the dead and forever dying. He gets to know Dean, become familiar with him, each wondrous second of his life. He sorts through the memories in chronological order. He wants to see Dean from the beginning of his life to the end, the subtle changes that shaped him as a man.

Dean is six months old and cries in the night. He can hear the rustle of demons outside the walls, waiting for Azazel's chosen boy, their black eyes peering in through the rectangular window above Dean's bed.

Dean is a year old and loves the taste of whipped cream off his mother's pinky finger. Mary laughs as he sucks it off greedily, leans forward to scoop up a tiny bit more from her ice cream sundae and feed Dean more, his tiny fists open in pleasure.

Dean is three and inconsolable when his father misses his pre-school Thanksgiving pageant. He's dressed as a Native American, construction paper feathers stapled to a brown paper headband loosely balanced atop his ears. He wears a tiny brown vest, matching pants, and small moccasins with beads his mother sewed on one by one the night before. She tells Dean he is the most handsome thing she has ever seen.

Dean does not want a little brother, he announces to his father on the drive to the hospital shortly before his fourth birthday. He swings his feet absently in the back seat, presses handprints to the Impala's windows, irritable and miserably disappointed. He wanted a sister, he says. A brother will take all of his toys. He also thinks the name Sam is dumb. Batman is a much better name. John sighs and buys Dean ice cream, does not object when Dean insists they buy some for the baby and Dean eats that cone as well.

Dean cries into John's shirt while their house burns, the flames so high and hot he feels the fire through his pajamas, even from across the street. He cries for his mom and for his favorite Batman and Superman action figures and his brand new sneakers. He cries because he is tired and because Sammy is crying too, both Winchester boys sobbing as a man with yellow eyes watches from Dean's smoking bedroom window.

At five, Dean can change a diaper in three and a half seconds flat. He knows to test the temperature of formula by squirting it onto the inside of his wrist, where the skin is most sensitive. He knows that the best way to stop his brother from crying is to stand with him in his arms, rock slowly from the heels of his feet to his toes while singing the ABC's. A-B-C-D-L-M-N-O-P Dean sings.

Dean gets a gun for his sixth birthday, a small, silver gun, just big enough for his little hands to wrap around to pull the trigger. John teaches Dean to lay salt around the doors and windows, tells him awful stories about the monsters outside that have Dean lying awake at night, his hands beneath his pillow, always wrapped around the gun.

Sam wails and clings to Dean's shirt, pleading and screaming. He doesn't want to go to his first day of kindergarten; he wants to go to class with Dean. Dean bats his long eyelashes up at Sam's pretty teacher and asks if it would be okay for him to stay, just for a little while. She shakes her head. Dean calls her a mean bitch. He and Sam are sent home for the day.

John takes Dean on his first hunt when he turns twelve. Dean helps in what should have been a simple salt and burn, but the ghost of the middle aged hit and run victim has other ideas. He shoots it in the head with a shotgun, giving his father enough time to set the bones aflame. Dean smells the decrepit flesh, the burning hair and bone, and thinks of his mother.

Minnie Hu gives Dean his first blowjob. Dean rests his back against the stall of the boy's bathroom of his third high school of his freshman year, grips Minnie's long black hair to hold her steady. Minnie is clumsy, slobbering around Dean's cock, so sweet and pretty he doesn't care she can't swallow everything when he comes. He kisses the side of her mouth, licks a drop of his own come away, pushes his hand up Minnie's skirt to where she's soft and warm.

Dean gives his first blowjob in the back of an empty parking lot, sixteen and drunk and rebellious. The boy's name is Darrel, Darrel Washington; he plays point guard for the basketball team. He isn't tall, shorter than Dean by two inches, and he fucks into Dean's mouth aggressive, condom he's put on tasting bitter of latex and greasy like lube. Dean likes it, though, and for a moment he imagines it's his brother doing this, his baby brother stretching his lips sore. He orgasms in his jeans the same moment Darrel pulls out, whips off the condom and comes all over his face, paints it hot and sticky, showers him with jizz.

Castiel stops to contemplate the moral complications of incest, lets Dean's memories filter back into the corner of his mind.

* * *

The sky is a washed-out blue, faded watercolors, dusty chalk smeared by fingertips, with smudges of cotton white clouds splattered like drips of paint. The clouds move like drips of paint too, melting, trickling down, slopping wetly into thick white puddles, bubbling and oozing when they touch his skin. The sky above him liquefies and turns to black, a shade of midnight coal, lightening to ashen gray in the rare seconds of dim light. He hears nothing but thunder and screams and laughter, Alastair's breathing hard and heavy in his ear. He's heard that women use the expression 'lie back and think of England' during this type of thing; supposedly it makes the entire situation less traumatic. He doesn't, at this moment in time, see any truth in the saying. Getting his ass fucked to thoughts of blue and red flags, fish and chips, Hugh Grant and Princess Diana or not, it's still pretty friggin' traumatic.

Alastair fucks into him hard, harsh and jerky movements, the quills of his cock scraping him raw inside. There's venom on the tips of the quills and it _burns_, a corrosive, agonizing burn, the slow and steady spread of acid, devouring his intestines inch by inch, working its way up into his body. It feels like his lower intestine is shot to hell and that's just the beginning, next it'll be his small intestine and up and up and up, until his heart disintegrates away and there is pain inside and out while Alastair works him over. Getting fucked is the worst and he thinks it hurts more than it's supposed to, more than it physically should, he thinks that's probably the point.

If he squeezes his eyes shut he can see his mother's face, the smooth angles of her face, the softness in her eyes. He can see Sammy too and they're off somewhere else right now. He's teaching Sammy how to tie his shoes, sitting in the back of the Impala in ninety degree heat, sweat dripping off his skin in rivers, windows rolled down and nothing but stale too hot air. _And the rabbit goes around the tree and through the hole_. He guides Sammy's hands with his own, in a clumsy parody of a loop, a sloppy imitation of shoe tying but Sammy grins down at the awkward loops and loose knots and beams. _I did it Dean_! He's not in hell right now and if there's anything in the world he's good at, one single fucking thing, it's pretending; pretending that inside he isn't dying, doesn't hate the worthless disappointment he's always been.

"Ah, ah, ah." Alastair's hands slither up to cup his face, claws and leathery skin resting on his cheeks, holding him flat between his palms. He thinks Alastair is going to kiss him, his face steady and pliable, shove his lips forward and kiss him, stick that decrepit tongue past his teeth. "None of that now Deano." Alastair doesn't kiss him, the hands move up past his cheeks, clawed thumbs gripping hold of his eyelids, spearing them with the nail. Alastair rips his eyelids away and now Dean can't help but _see_, see everything, the buzz of pleasure in Alastair's white eyes as he fucks him, sucks his eyelids off the tips of his claws and eats them, chews them loud and messy and slow. "You taste so sweet Dean." Alastair licks over his completely exposed eyeballs and the venom in his blood has finally made it to his stomach. His stomach bursts and then his own acids are eating him alive as well, his muscles trembling and twitching, the fire spreading down through his abdomen as another fire crawls upwards, seeking out the beating muscle in his chest.

The world inside his head bleeds back into reality, and he just bleeds.

* * *

Hell is unfamiliar; hell is a different world. It is beneath the world, constructed from the negativity of humanity, blackness and malice and cruelty. Hell is made of sand; it shifts and crumbles, formed fresh with a modicum of pressure, fingers piling it high and feet that kick it down. The desert stretches endlessly before him, and the sand is boiling beneath his feet, so hot it almost burns, _would_ boil the flesh from his bones, char the soles of his feet to ash if he were made of skin and bone, if he were of anything other than light. The sand moves in ripples and it is alive, buzzing with pent up energy, and he thinks if he were not a soldier of the Lord it would attempt to swallow him whole, grip him tightly and drag him under struggling.

"Disgusting." Uriel points far off in the distance, to the silhouettes of souls moving against the black background of hell, the eternal night sky.

The shapes are souls and they are not.

They live and they breathe and yet they are dead, corrupted and twisted like melted wax pulled apart and frozen again.

They are not demons; they are caught in-between, in a state of limbo, a personal purgatory among the endless sea of burning sand. He walks and as he moves forward the souls move back, creeping further into the blackness, where his light cannot find them. He watches them move to his right, stalking him; damned souls seeking out the light, moths congregating around the flame.

In the morning, when the lightning crackles at its brightest, he counts three sets of half-dark eyes. The night before, there were six, and somewhere behind him a pack of demons laughs and laughs, the sound dissolving into a noise that barely resembles laughter; a sound that is not human or ever was, a sound born from sulfur and evil.

"How far to go?" The sound of Dean Winchester's death taunts him, the wet gurgle of a dying scream in a righteous man's bloody throat.

Uriel is silent; Zachariah flexes the feathers on his back.

The sand rumbles, and in ahead there is a primal, agonized wail.

The damned are animals. They are without sanity, without consciousness, driven to a mental state of nonexistence. Hell swallows up humanity, demons feed off it, and the sand burns it, fuels its blazing fires with the shards of coherency from sinful men. The damned laugh and it is not laughing, it is a keening sound, a low, ugly noise deep in the belly. It is a cross between a growl and the uncontrollable chuckling of a madman.

Before him, the damned feast, one of their equals spread out steaming at their feet. They rip into the woman's stomach with their hands, pry apart her skin and bone, tear the muscle holding her together to get to the warm treasures in her abdomen, the protected, secret flesh concealed by the bones of her ribs, the unyielding wall of her sternum. They are down to two and the blood runs up past their elbows, splashed onto their naked bodies, grabbing handfuls of organs. A deranged man, half wild, half evil, and also half lost, holds a kidney in his palms, his face pressed into it so deep the blood smears from one of his cheeks to the other and dribbles down into the sand as he bites. The second, an adolescent, her hair gnarled and knotted, stiff with dried blood, hauls the victim's entrails out inch by inch. When she reaches the end, where the small intestine meets the stomach, she rips it free, licks and sucks the bile from both ends as it gushes out, staining a pale, sickly yellow splotch on the blood soaked sand.

"Animals." Uriel spits, wings quivering in his disgust.

"Damned." He corrects, overcome with the urge to touch them, to reach out and stroke the dirty, soiled skin, cleanse it into absolution, cleanse _them_ into redemption. They are sinners, they are the dark, and he was made to bring them light, purify and brighten the blackest recesses of creation.

"Leave them Castiel. They aren't for us." Raphael grasps his shoulder, guides him forward, into the continuing vastness of the outskirts of hell. He is under the suspicion that they did not come to bring light, but perhaps to collect darkness.

* * *

For awhile he thought he was adjusting. He thought he could do it. He was so sure.

It stops being easy three years, two days, and thirty nine seconds in, when there aren't any clouds in the dark, bloody sky.

He can still taste the blood in the back of his throat from his first torture session with Alastair. Dried blood tastes crusty like the copper of stale pennies left to warm in the sun, stuffed deep in the pocket of a leather jacket. He clears his throat and spits, clears and spits, blood on his tongue and in-between his teeth.

"How are you today, Dean?" Alastair uses that introductory tone with him, chock-full of false pleasantries. Alastair says this is their time to get to know each other. He knows all he needs to know about Alastair. Alastair's a demon, nothing else about him is important. "The silent treatment again?" Alastair touches a finger to his lips. His skin is dry, has the texture of a sandpaper covered raisin. "Someone is playing hard to get."

"You're not nearly as funny as you think you are." He wants to add the word bastard or asshole or son of a bitch to the end of a sentence, but he wants this part to last. This is his calm before the storm; this is his plume of smoke before the volcanic eruption. Alastair's Mount Vesuvius and he's goddamn Pompeii.

"There's my boy." Alastair bumps his face affectionately. "You can't hide that cocky streak of yours. Not from me." He can't hide anything from Alastair, not even the contents of his mind. Alastair reads his memories like they're pages in a book, scenes in a documentary. He rewinds and rereads and fasts forward, pauses on his favorite parts. Alastair brings up whatever he can to hurt him emotionally, in those special places where his blade can't reach. "We're doing something extra special today, Deano. I know what you've been up to. Did you think I wouldn't catch on? You're so very predictable."

"What have I been doing?" It's dumb to ask, really fucking stupid actually. He already knows what the answer is going to be, and it's the reason Alastair is so utterly pissed. If Alastair could breathe fire, Dean'd be a crisp.

"You'll see." Alastair's white eyes gleam bright with mischief and then he's kissing him, scaly lips chaffing his raw. Alastair's mouth tastes of blood and rotting skin, with a distinct aftertaste of sulfur, so foul it makes him want to wretch. Alastair's tongue is dry and heavy against his, sucking out the moisture from his saliva, wrapping around his tongue like a thick, sun-wrinkled worm. If this is how Alastair wants to play, he can join in the game too. He chomps down on Alastair's tongue as hard as he can, clamps his teeth tight together. Alastair's blood is bitter sulfur rushing down his throat, gushing from his severed tongue. When Alastair draws back he leaves a piece of his tongue in Dean's mouth; it flops around in death spasms, stops wriggling on the ground once he spits it out. He spits dingy yellow, the same yellow dripping down Alastair's chin, coloring the lines between his pointed teeth. "Mmm, feisty." He's never bitten Alastair before. He likes to go with the flow, let Alastair do his thing, wait for him to leave, think about his car and his brother and a cool bottle of beer. This already feels different. This isn't Alastair gloating before he fucks him, this is something straight out of_ Deliverance_, so he's looking at what is apparently Alastair's rape face.

"Want me to squeal like a piggy?" He feels reckless, buzzes with it, the wings of hummingbirds under his skin. He should shut the fuck up. Most of him wants to. He could close his eyes and go somewhere else. One flutter of his lashes and he can be anywhere he wants, sitting in the Impala with Sam, eating a cheeseburger straight from its wrapper, grease and ketchup dripping onto the knee of his jeans.

"You can scream like any farm animal you want." Alastair's tongue grows back and his words change from slurred and mispronounced to clear and understandable again. "I thought we had something special, you and I. I thought we were getting to understand each other." Alastair grips him by the back of his neck and holds him still while he kisses him. "You don't know how thrilled I was when you gave into me. I thought; well here's a guy who's a quick study. This is a genius of a man. He knows what's good for him. He's going to handle his time down here swell." Alastair chuckles and licks his chin, laps his way back into Dean's mouth. "You act tough Dean but we both know I make you shiver and scream. You lie there nonchalant, taking it like a man, when you aren't paying one lick of attention. Let me fill you in on a secret. You don't get the luxury of fantasy here. The only fantasies you can have are the ones I allow you to, the ones that involve me fucking you like you deserve. I'm gonna push so far up your pretty ass you feel me for weeks. You'll hurt in ways you won't understand. You won't be able to muster a single thought other than prayers for death, let alone thoughts about your brother."

His spit turns sour and hard to swallow.

"What more are you gonna do to me? Cut out my spleen and feed it to me? Bend me over far enough I can touch my nose to my back?" Please no. He's had enough.

"I like your creativity" Alastair kisses his mouth sore and bloody. His lips are one big bruise attached to his face. "But I don't feel much in the mood for foreplay."

"Only selfish lovers skip foreplay."

"You'll learn soon enough that everyone in hell is selfish." Alastair leans down as if to kiss him, slides his body in close, his cock nudging already half hard between Dean's legs. This is standard procedure, the signal to retreat.

"Please don't." His pleads are small, insignificant and tiny, they brush off Alastair like butterflies, specks of dust in the wind. He would fight if he could; kick Alastair below the belt if he were able, but the rack is designed for immobility, the hooks in his thighs spreading him wide open and defenseless.

"Shhh." Alastair soothes, chest rumbling with badly suppressed laughter. Alastair's giddy from it, from helpless begging, dick impossibly harder with every word he says, every desperate please. "This isn't anything we haven't done before; you just get to experience it in all of its sensual glory." Alastair has to force his way in, press and shove, tearing through his natural resistance. He never knew it could hurt this bad, before he'd be a little relaxed, slack because his mind was currently out of order. It was never supposed to be this. "There we go." Alastair strokes a patch of skin on his hip over and over, strokes the flesh tender before finally it loosens and drags away under the force of Alastair's claws.

"That's it?" He doesn't sound nearly as convincing as he hoped. His voice is broken, trembling and strained as he chokes down tears. He hasn't cried yet, Alastair hasn't broken him fully. "You've fucked me harder than this."

"I know that, Dean." Alastair lets his quills unfurl, a thousand needles released inside him. They stick up into him so deep he doesn't have a quick enough reaction time to vocalize his scream before Alastair pulls out, shreds his insides like paper. "I know everything you try and hide in that fragile skull of yours. We have no secrets, you and I." Blood rushes down his thighs each time Alastair slides out. "I know about how you let your little brother fuck you, how your Sammy stuffed you full with his cock. You got off on that, didn't you, Dean?" Alastair does something _wrong_, breaks something important, his vision swimming, fluids that aren't blood or come or anything normal leaking out of him. He never thought something a demon said could make him feel dirty. "You loved Sam fucking you, the thought of incest making you all hot and bothered." It wasn't like that, but Alastair isn't going to listen, even if he could muster the strength and coherency to talk. He shivers and trembles, mouth invaded by Alastair's tongue again ***NC-17 disturbing image removed*** "Did Sam fuck you like this, Dean? Hold you down and manhandle his way in?" There are flashbacks in his head he can't block. Sam grabbing him with his huge ass hands, a giant palm flat on the center of his chest to keep him flat on his back while he kissed him. "You're never gonna be able to think about your little brother again, not without the memory of me inside you."

"Fuck you." He coughs up blood that Alastair licks away. He's slowly dying, but if there is justice somewhere in the world he'll die before Alastair can finish, before the acid eats him.

"Sorry Deano, that isn't going to happen." Alastair's cock burrows into him and parts of him are definitely getting snared in the spikes. A section of his large intestine comes ripping out, dragged along through him like spaghetti, the blood and bile slicking Alastair's way. He's getting fucked to death, in every sense of the word, and the reality is nowhere near as fun as it should be. He misses when Alastair fucked him with the intention of getting himself off.

"I think I'm dying." Something vicious tasting and dull brown slides out over his lips, across Alastair's not so pretty face. The sourness reminds him of getting drunk in San José after a hunt for a chupacabra, puking booze and a breakfast burrito onto the carpet by the bed, Sam downright grossed out when he'd still tried to suck his cock after, moved to blow Sam with that acerbic sweetness in his saliva. Sam had rudely declined after that, mopped up the floor with motel towels.

"I'm the most memorable fuck you'll have." No one's ever fucked him so hard they kept strips and portions of him with them, that's for sure. He's a bleeding mess somewhere he can't see, just behind his belly button, right on the other side of his stomach wall.

"No arguing there." Convulsions make him bite his tongue. He severs it completely, as he did with Alastair's. Their wounds match, it's sort of twistedly romantic, his blood mingling with Alastair's, red and yellow making orange. What he spits is the color of fire, neon orange signs and Crayola, the ugly little backpack Sam had in second grade, a really cheesy fake tan. His blood doesn't have the flavor of Alastair's though, is one hundred percent human, not a drop of sulfur, salty with a trace of iron. He sucks all of it that he can back into his mouth; he doesn't want Alastair to lick it off him. His abused stomach curls in on itself, twitching, acid burning in his chest. It hurts to breathe and move and _be_, a waterfall of blood building inside him.

"Don't you die yet." Alastair's hands are red, pawing at his face, clutching it too tight, spreading blood across the bridge of his nose. Alastair speeds up his pace, hips snapping fast, a ritual in-out-in-out-in-in-in, jabbing up excruciatingly deeper. If there were an inner inch of him unscathed, it would be a pulpy mess by now. His innards are soup; he hopes Alastair doesn't feel in the mood to drink it. "I want to see your face when I come." Alastair makes a resigned noise; disappointed. "I'll have to be more careful with you next time, my delicate little flower." Alastair pinches his cheek, pleasant and condescending.

He doesn't have to feel when Alastair comes, because the remaining ten feet of his small intestine coil out of him, taking the last of his blood and consciousness with it.

* * *

He has begun to fear that hell is never ending. Hell may very well stretch on for eternity. There is little known of this land, no angel assigned to map it, no soul returned to supply the information. There are matters far more concerning than the endless landscape, however, secret, pressing matters that afflict his mind. It is a mental sickness, a moral plague. He feels uncertain; he has doubts and questions, raw information when he is incapable of proper analysis.

He's witnessed Dean kiss his brother on the mouth, plant his hands square on his brother's shoulders, dip his fingers into the curves on the sides of Sam's neck. They have done more than just kiss, passed through the acceptable realm of innocent curiosity. One incestuous transgression can be forgiven, but Dean's life is heinously excessive. Dean does all activities in excess, eat and drink and fight, love; it is a surprise there is anything of him left.

"Is it right to judge a man by one less than favorable aspect of his character?"

Zachariah ignores him; Raphael trudges forward. The terrain is swampy, sandy blood two meters deep, a marsh that a distant river trickles into. There are dead and dying souls in the shallows, groaning with spasming gills, gasping like fish left to dry in the sun.

"It would depend on the severity of his sin. Mortal or venial?"

"I'm not sure." The human Bible says that man should not lie with man as he does with women. This seems mostly ignored in heaven, the interpreted words of God of little importance, meanings jumbled and lost in translation. "What are the restrictions on sexual intimacy with one's siblings?"

"Incest is culturally unacceptable by multiple social standards." Uriel contemplates, staring at his reflection on the surface of the water. When it ripples Uriel's face is distorted into nothing but rays of light. There are few natural colors here; the primaries of hell are black and red and brown, the different colors of blood and flesh in its various putrid stages, the spectrum of shades for rotting flesh. "From what I recall Abraham and Sarah were related by blood. For centuries females were forbidden to marry outside their bloodline."

"What are your opinions?" There should be rules for this. Their father has done billions of years of work and yet it is not enough. He created the earth, created its inhabitants, composed its basic governing rules and still there are loopholes and questions. Man substitutes his own responses and assumptions in these empty spaces, but he and his brothers are not nearly as ignorant. He would never suppose the will of God. He does not have the right.

"Consanguinity disgusts me." Uriel can be very opinionated. Sometimes Castiel wishes he could form thoughts without direct proof, without evidence from an outside source. "There are six billion monkeys on the planet; they have no need to breed with each other."

"Does God forbid it?" Demented children run through the wetlands laughing, chasing each other in hungry packs. The youngest is only two years old, sprinting on wobbly legs, small fangs bared. One of them latches himself onto Uriel's leg, starts to gnaw on it, pierce his light. Uriel burns the toddler to ashes with one touch of his hand, flames erupting from the young one's skin. Its scream is horrible, wild, shrieking laughter, the sound of a happy child. Sam would laugh that way when Dean tickled the bottoms of his feet without stopping, tickled until there were tears in Sam's eyes.

"You'd have to ask him yourself." There are never any true answers. He asks a sibling, who tells him to ask his father, though their father is nowhere to be found. He is too low ranking to ever see the man face to face. He doesn't have the clearance. He envies Michael on occasion. His brother has seen the face of God; one of the few men or angels in history. Moses saw God and aged years; mortals have turned to salt in the presence of angels. The unworthy are given glimpses of paradise before they burn. He does not want to burn.

Around him, the eyes of the children simmer in their skulls.

* * *

"Dean Winchester." This demon is not Alastair. He thinks it was female once, it has the faintest traces of breasts, withered and dried, wrinkled black and gray skin stretched tightly over curved hips. It looks like a woman who is death, has gone to hell and back, walked into the shadows a candle and emerged from them dark; an extinguished flame and deformed, hardened wax. She's something straight out of when plastic surgery goes wrong, an explosion of botox and fast forwarded aging, one of those mummies Sam used to show him pictures of in his school textbooks. She has a pair of massive black wings that extend towards the sky, twenty feet long from tip to tip, stretching magnificently from her back, large, impressive bat wings, the bones at the ends sharp as filed steel, dripping blood.

"Ugly demon bitch." He spits out a mouthful of his own blood, three of his dislodged, oozing teeth. Alastair enjoys pulling his teeth out one by one and embedding them in his exposed brain, damaging a different crucial section as he does so. By the end, he's too far gone to function, blind and deaf and mute and dead to hell, incapable of even a simple thought, and still he's able to _feel_.

"Aww. You don't remember me. I guess a few decades in hell will do that to a girl." She's alien to him, as black as hell itself, as recognizable as a shadow in the night. "C'mon, Dean, sweetheart, you know me." She doesn't have teeth, only two fangs, clawed cat hands and feet. "The things I put you and your brother through. All the fun we had?"

"Meg?" He's not afraid, not of Meg. Not after Alastair. This is a treat, a brief reprieve from eternity. Alastair is cruel and vicious and sharp, all hard angles and dangerous corners where Meg is wicked, a softer brand of evil, made from concentrate and not the real thing.

"No. I'm just like you Dean, a lowly, damned soul." For a moment she flickers, fuzzy like an old television program, grainy around the edges, but she's right, he knows that face.

"Bela?" Fresh blood spurts from the holes in his gums, dribbling hot down the side of his chin, the inside of his throat, a steady, slick, constant flow of warmth into his stomach.

"Finally. You're really quite dense Dean." Bela – no – the monster Bela has become, the parody of a soul hell has turned her into bares her fangs at him. Her tongue, _oh_ god her tongue is a snake, and he can hear its rattle buzzing in Bela's throat, echoing through her as she laughs, throws her head back and screams delight to the abyss, serpent watching him curiously through her open mouth.

"Hell wasn't kind to you Bela. You're an ugly ass bitch." Her hair is baby snakes, he realizes dimly in horror, swallowing down more of his blood to keep from gasping his shock at the little heads worming their way out of her skull, flicking forked tongues in his direction, tasting his flesh in the air molecules. Dark, dark Bela is dark, the night and the shadows and the inside of his eyelids, sucking his light, consuming it, making him so dark he shivers with the coldness of it.

"On the contrary, it's been wonderful." Bela stops laughing but the sound of her elated, high pitched, glass shattering laughter echoes. "It could be wonderful to you too Dean, if you'd let it." She has a scalpel and she sharpens it with her fingertips, filing it against her claws, bright orange sparks raining down from where the steel and her nails meet. The sparks flicker on the ground and die; taking with them the only light in this eternal night. "I spent one day on the rack." Bela presses the scalpel gently to the place where his neck and chest meet, just below his collarbone, and pushes down just light enough to pierce his skin, sink the very tip of the blade into him. "The demons didn't even have to torture me before I said yes." She applies pressure and blood wells up messily from the inch long cut, dribbling red down his chest, collecting warmly in his bellybutton. "They thought I'd scream, but I came off the rack smiling." Bela cuts him from sternum to stomach, one, deep wound that she then pries open with her claws, his muscle stretching squelching around her fingers as she tears at it to open up his chest. It hurts and it burns, a thousand needles up and down the length of his spine, flames licking away at the skin being torn away from him in wet pieces. Bela has no finesse, he notices, lost in the pathetic sound of his own wail. She's sloppy, messy, eager, working him open just to hurt, completely amateur, he's a regular Buffalo Bill in comparison to her first time serial killer. He's losing too much blood and he'll be dead within the hour, probably sooner, judging from the red on Bela's hands, the slickness gushing down the front of him, splashing appallingly onto the floor with the sound of a rushing faucet. Bela hacks and she claws and the world goes white the instant she forces her fingers through the bone in the center of his chest, the one that protects his heart. Pain is so _bright_, crackles of electricity coursing through him, lighting his every nerve with painful, excruciating fire. "Alastair wasn't lying when he said you scream pretty." She's holding his heart in her hand, squeezing it against her palm, her nails cutting into it, and now blood is pooling in his chest, and the pressure is suffocating him, building up and crushing his lungs, sending his heart into frantic spasms.

"Go to hell." He slurs, blood on his tongue, blood everywhere, warm warm _warm_ everywhere blood is on his skin.

"We're already here."

He dies with the dry rustle of leaves over asphalt sound of Bela's giggle in his ears, the word bitch dying in his vocal chords.

* * *

The uppermost plain of hell is separated from the next by a wide river. It brings to mind the children's hymn about the crossing of the river Jordan. _One wide river_. The song exists somewhere in Dean's memories, sung soft and low in a female voice. _And that wide river is Jordan_. The river is a foul and putrid thing, oozing black, too thick to move, crusted over solid in places. It's fetid of the dead and dying, blood dried and left to rot and warm in the inhuman heat. Below the liquid's surface there is movement, bloated, ash gray bodies slithering, bubbles rising from their half open mouths. They are souls swollen over with defeat, lost and drowning, swallowing liter after liter of old blood.

"Be careful." Uriel holds him back, stretches his wings out to block Castiel's path, feathers sharp and shimmering. "If they catch hold of you, they'll drag you down so deep you won't ever get out." The bodies slide wet again, a solitary foot breaching the surface, black and shiny in the air.

"I'm well aware." More bubbles rise and pop, dark combination of blood and bile churning. "How do we get across?" His wings function in this heinous realm yet with their use he loses the valuable element of surprise, if it still exists, for he doubts a band of angels traveling through hell can do unnoticed. They are light and there is no other light in hell, they are the flicker of a candle in a dark room.

"Fly." Raphael frowns, fluid lapping at the sandy bank. The river is so wide it's impossible to see the opposite shore. It stretches on forever, endless and endless ripples in the eerie black. "We'll go quickly."

_One wide river_.

He leaves the ground thrumming with life, a subtle heartbeat that buzzes grains of sand. The sky is relatively peaceful but they fly low, a body length or two from the river. He can see his reflection, brighter than streaks of lightning, the brightest thing in hell. The bodies in the river notice it too, rise to examine it, their eyes soaked over black, jaws slack and broken, teeth rotten and missing. They are as inhuman as the roaming damned, softer and more docile, creatures of lumbering movement. As he flies he watches for Dean, the ink of an anti-possession tattoo on a distended chest, while the center of his soul is crushed by an unknown weight Uriel tells him is dread.

_There's one wide river to cross_.

When he and his brethren reach the river's shore, there is an army of demons waiting for them. The demons are dark and ominous, standing in rows over half a mile long, endless living waves of a demonic sea. Castiel can't distinguish one demon from another; they are all the same, one single extension of hell, made of sulfur and evil.

"I told you this would happen." Raphael ignores him, his blade at the ready, over two feet of fortified light, condensed down into a weapon. When the angels were new, when the world was young and they were fledgling creations, they would tell stories. Michael said their weapons were forged from God himself, the sharpest, deadliest pieces of him. He likes the idea of fighting with a fragment of the father he's never met.

"I'm going to kill more of the filth than the rest of you combined." Uriel is gleeful and smiling.

"It's not a competition."

"You say that because you're going to lose."

Demons die messily. They bleed and splatter, come apart under his sword. Their blood has the scent of sulfur; they bleed sulfur the color of pus from an infected wound. He carves through them all and their blood coats him, covers him whole with their stink. A black creature, hunched over and crooked, spine bent at an angle, attacks him, snarling, saliva frothing from its mouth. He cuts off its head and the stump erupts in a fountain of slick, thick yellow, rushing out like the geysers of Yosemite. Its headless body shrivels, empty and shapeless without its blood. Its head watches him, black and red veined eyes wide open.

"Good aim." One of his brothers pats his back; his sword slices a demon clean down the center of its body. Entrails flop out wetly, coiling in the sand; steaming. His blade is yellowed by the sulfuric blood and each new kill adds a fresh layer. He steps on limbs that lie twitching in the sand, fingers spasming with remnant impulses, feet dragging themselves in sluggish trails. The air smells of decomposing flesh and sulfur, the moldy sweetness of overripe fruit.

"I'm looking for Dean Winchester." He holds a demon to the ground with his sword, blade protruding through its stomach, keeping it flat against the ground.

"Never heard of him." It spits, hissing like a feral cat. A feral cat sunk its teeth into Dean's hand once. Dean had been no older than seven, trying to shoo a stray cat Sam had let in through the window. He'd grabbed its tail, shoved it, and the cat had arched and bit him, little fangs deep inside his un-calloused, baby-soft hands.

"You're lying. Everyone has heard of Dean Winchester." The Winchesters are things of legend, John's boys and Azazel's boys and God's too.

"No shit, Sherlock." It laughs wild. "I'm a demon. Honesty doesn't come as part of the package."

If he leans his weight forward, body solid atop the sword, the demon cries and sputters.

"Fuck you."

He presses harder, sulfur squirts into his eye, burning hot.

"Son of a bitch!" The demon coughs blood. "I'll eat your eyes and suck the marrow from your bones and feathers."

"Tell me where Dean Winchester is." He twists and there is a crunching sound.

"Where the fuck do you think he is angel?" it moans, writhing around its stabbed abdomen. "On the rack where the bitch souls go. Dean Winchester is a demon's bitch as we speak." It laughs again, breathing labored, chest rising in hitching, uneven movements. "I'm telling you the truth this time, demon's honor, or lack thereof."

"I believe you." It's as he feared, as he expected. Dean Winchester sold his soul so of course it is chained to eternal suffering, plagued by existential torment. He would not wish such a fate on the sinners of the world, least of all a man of innocence. He withdraws his sword, blood gushing from the demon's now open wound.

"They're retreating." Uriel is bathed in blood, darkened, crusted yellow. "We should move."

"You won't find him. He's mince meat; he's been mince meat for years." The babblings of a wounded demon mean nothing. Demons lie, demons always lie.

"Be silent."

The demon's skull breaks beneath Uriel's foot.


	2. Chapter 2

Alastair has a real passion for the classics. He can come up with new torture methods sure, prides himself on his originality. Alastair can make a person feel pain in ways they never imagined. He lit a fire in Dean's intestines and watched it burn, smiling when blisters sizzled on his skin, burning to a crisp from the inside out. That was one of the better days, a method Alastair rarely employs. Alastair prefers more hands on work, just a body, the rack, and his handy dandy razor.

"Your knife, how surprising." Alastair appears to him twirling his blade, spinning it round and round. "I haven't seen that in about two days. I was starting to miss it."

"He missed you Deano." The razor is always he, never she, though it splices through his skin with the finesse of a woman, the quiet kind of grace only girls have, delicate and pretty but they can still be sharp and painful. Women are some of the meanest bitches he's ever known. The sight of the shining metal makes him miss his baby, her sleek paint and perfect leather seats. "What shall we do today? I think I'd like to pop your eyeballs out of their sockets." Alastair's creativity is endless; the guy has a gift for it, a sick knack for causing pain. Alastair is an artist and blood his water colors. "You want me to dig your eyes out, boy?"

He knows better than to answer, he's made that mistake before, spent three long, long days of uninterrupted torture. In hell a man can bleed more than ten pints of blood if his torturer wants him to. He'd bled enough to fill a swimming pool, enough to fill an entire ocean.

"No need to tell me right away." Alastair rests the tip of the blade on the skin at the corner of his eye, the soft indentation where little eye crusties form while you sleep. "This is going to hurt." Like always, Alastair isn't exaggerating. He slides the tip straight along the bottom of his eye socket, through skin and all, tilts the knife up and flicks his wrist back. His eyeball falls out with the sound of suction, the pain literally blinding while his eye dangles loose on the right side of his face, sloppy with blood and eye mucous. "How many fingers?"

"Three." His eyelid tries to shut and can't close around his optic nerve.

"Good. You're a lucky guy, Dean; you get to watch me work you over."

The last thing he sees before he dies for the ten thousandth time are the black, empty caverns where his eyes used to be.

* * *

The bloody holes in his thighs and shoulders heal before his feet touch solid ground, before his heels dig into the boiling sand and still, testing to see if his skin will sizzle. The heat fades to a balmy warmth, something more tolerable, something pleasant and comforting, something lazy and nice. He doesn't feel pain. It's the first time in fucking years and not a single muscle in his body aches, not an inch of his flesh burns and throbs. He isn't cut or gutted like a gasping fish and it dawns on him that he _gave in_ and it is everything Alastair promised. The pain has ceased and he will do anything, _anything_ to keep it from coming back.

"Delightful isn't it?" Alastair asks, sliding an arm around his shoulders, the scales and wrinkled black skin of his arm scratching the nape of his neck. "Painless?"

"It's wonderful." He gasps, Alastair's claws tracing circles down his side. He waits for them to sink in, plunge their way through the spaces between his ribs, puncture his lungs and make him hurt.

The anticipated pricks and jabs don't come. Alastair's claws trace the outlines of his stomach muscles, making them twitch and quiver beneath his skin, trembling where they're knotted tight against expected intrusion. He can't blame them, can't blame himself really, for assuming that after all this time he's suddenly off the rack, whole and free and painless, a liberated man no worse for the wear, only a little darker. He can see it, the darkness rolling in slow waves over his epidermis; the layer Alastair says is closest to the surface, the one that doesn't hurt too badly to break and peel away inch by inch, like skinning a potato, except beneath he's pink and glistening, not white and slimy.

"I promised you it would be. I'd never lie to you, Deano, others maybe, but never you. You know that don't you?" Does he? Does he _know_? No, Alastair lies, Alastair is a demon, forged from lies and sulfur and evil. Alastair lies as certain as he breathes, as surely as he holds a blade in his hand and carves without hesitation, bloodying his arms past the elbows. But oh _god_ he's looking at Alastair now and he can't for the life of him, for the sake of his goddamn soul see anything other than the truth bubbling in Alastair's hideous black eyes. He's here after all, standing in the reddish brown sand, Alastair's arm snug around him, and it almost feels good, almost feels right. There's a blackness contorting in his stomach, itching at his insides, screaming, tugging the moral fibers of his heart, pleading _go back go back go back_ and he won't, not again. He isn't a strong enough man and he knows it. He's never been strong enough for something like this. He can handle death, death is easy, death is quick, death is fun, death ends it and here, in hell, it's being alive for centuries. This is immortality at its worst, its sickest and perverted, a twisted handful of copper wire on a bloody palm.

Off the rack, hell is a barren, bloodied black landscape, chains crisscrossing through the abyss that functions as a sky. Alastair walks with intent and purpose in front of him, hooves pressing half-circle indentations into the sand.

Alastair leads him to the proverbial, and apparently literal, lake of fire. The flames leap and sway like the surface of the ocean, tumbling on and in their depths there is a mass of black. The bridge across is forged from bones, the widest parts of a human shoulder, femurs strung along in a morbid necklace, makeshift railings with graying bits of flesh, shoddy ropes of braided human hair holding the decaying pieces together. The bones creak beneath his bare feet, searing hot, baked glossy and brittle.

"You might want to watch your step here, Dean." One of the bones gives way, foot falling through the empty space past his knee. "You fall in there; you don't come out, just ask them." Alastair points and now he recognizes the black shapes bobbing, the hysterical screaming in the air, wild and eerie like the cackle of hyenas. The charred black skeletons reach for him, burned so badly they're nearly ashes, scorched bony fingers protruding helplessly, wiggling over the surface of the blue and orange fire. They're packed in so tightly there isn't room for them to move, layers and layers of perpetually flaming bodies, blackened souls going down deep, squirming and wailing together. Those that are pushed flat against the black and red sand shore can't escape either, because the sand has been heated to glass, and the damned stare at their dark scalded bones and scream, fingers scrabbling to find grip on the smooth, smooth glass. Their bones are so far gone that they crumble to grainy dust, breaking off into deformed, fractured nubs, hands snapping at the wrists as they continue their futile attempt at freedom from the hellfire. A hand nearly closes around his heel and Alastair tugs him forward, up and away.

"Thanks." His throat is dry as sandpaper, drier even, hot and heavy if he swallows, scratchy and stinging if he doesn't.

"You get one get out of jail free card, Dean. That was yours. If you want someone to save your pretty ass, go back to the rack and wait." _Never_. There is no force on earth or hell, the deepest recesses of his imagination, no emaciated inkling of fantasy that can get him to go back. He sold his soul once and he's done, no more gambling with his most prized possession; the only worthwhile asset he has, had, and will have. He doubts there's anywhere lower for his soul to go from here, something worse than the rack maybe. He could be thrown into the lake of fire perhaps, strung up helpless and alone somewhere. Rabid little fuckers could feed on him with sharpened teeth and their prying fingers ripping him open. They would wriggle their way beneath his skin to squirm and breed, feed on him ounce of flesh by ounce. Yeah, that sounds pretty terrible; it almost makes torture seem like the human thing to do to folks down here. He wonders what happens to the souls that don't go straight to the rack or are set loose without the benefit of their own past abuser and rapist for company. Alastair might be pain incarnate, evil condensed down into a corporeal form, but he's a lifeline, an opportunity for survival. Dean isn't dumb enough to give that up, he doesn't need his G.E.D. to know that sticking with Alastair is greater than or equal to good.

"Where are we?" The lake burns behind them and looming visible in the distance is a large, pointed shape, square and sculpted around the edges. As he comes closer he sees it's a house, well, as close to a house as he expects to find in hell. It looks like one of those old pseudo-castle structures in horror movies, white and enormous, sinister where it sits, surrounded on all sides by the almost invisible twitches and shifts in the sand, the silhouettes of creatures darting around the blackness. He places his hand on the largest pillar, feels the surface of it, the complete softness under his palm. The material isn't stone, isn't hardened and molded sand. There's a sickly yellow tinge to it and he recognizes the substance; bone, pure bone, an entire house of bone filed down and polished smooth like sallow marble. Thousands and thousands of bones against his fingertips, melted together and rubbed to perfection, crafted by countless demonic hands.

"_Mon chateau_ Deano. It's not much" Alastair smiles at a joke Dean doesn't understand, can't even hear. "but it gets the job done. Every demon needs a place to call his own." The double doors(dozens of pelvises glued side by side, the curves of what used to be hips touching) swing open with a flick of his clawed fingers, revealing the expected darkened corridor, floor of sand heated into glass, candles flickering when he walks past, the blackness swirling around him; disorienting. He supposes it's too much to expect a speck of normalcy to exist in the horrible little place Alastair calls his home. The walls are adorned with flesh stripped skulls staring down at him, their jaws open in silent screams; warning him to run away. He wants to run, sprint off and find solace in the darkness out there, merge himself with the shadows and never leave, but his rationality prevails and his muscles give into it because they're his brain's bitches. "Now for the _piece de resistance_." More pelvic bone doors, the strong smell of sulfur, and he's standing in Alastair's bedroom, staring at his terrified reflection. Alastair has a bed, surprisingly. Dean assumed he slept standing up or hanging upside down from the ceiling, spun himself a web to slink into before sleep. "Go on." Alastair shoves him rough and he lands on the bed, slab of stone that serves as the mattress sending angry flares of pain up his spine when it collides with his tailbone.

"It's nice?" He doesn't know what Alastair is looking for, what he wants. He tries to improvise, say what he thinks Alastair wants, but more times than often he does it wrong. The thirty years of torture are proof of that. "The blanket is soft."

"It's more than that. I had that blanket made for me thousands of years ago." Alastair lapses into fond reminiscence, he does this sometimes. It used to piss Dean off when Alastair told him what were, to Alastair, entertaining stories of the good old days of fire and brimstone, the discovery of sin on earth while he removed Dean's pancreas just to see how long it took him to die, for the sheer curiosity and fun of it. "It took two hundred days to complete."

"Crappy sewing machines?"

"Rarity of material, actually." Alastair grips the end of the blanket between his fingertips and rubs his thumbs in circles, humming, white eyes glazed over in pleasure. "I could have used multiple children, but I wanted this to be special. No one had skin as soft as little Emmanuel. I don't know what that kiddo did to be sent to hell, young as he was, barely old enough to talk in complete sentences. God isn't really as forgiving as the Bible makes it out to be. He shipped that silk skinned tyke down here, didn't he? He was such a good boy when I skinned him, never made a sound, and when I was done? I let that boy off the rack, raised him right; raised him to be one of the best. World War I? That was all Emmanuel's doing. He never quite had a knack for torture though, just didn't have_ enough_ potential. He was more of an idea man." Alastair shrugs and bile surges in Dean's throat, burning hot and sickly, sour and sweet when it travels high enough to register on his taste buds. "It's a shame." Alastair shrugs, clicking his purple tongue against his teeth. "He staged a rebellion against me a few years ago. He decided he should be in charge of the torturing down here, smug little bastard. I had to kill him, hung the bitch from the balcony of this place by his intestines. Such a waste of talented youth. Made one hell of a blanket, though."

"What else could you do?" He tries to laugh, his chest hollow as empty glass, three times as fragile. "He sounded like a dick."

"Biggest dick south of Earth." Alastair stretches, languid and lazy as a cat, his left hoof rubbing Dean's leg at the knee. "I'm sure I won't have the same problem with you. I'd hate to mount your pretty head up on my wall."

"My dad said I was born to be obedient." Dad told him he was born to be his soldier, his perfect little pawn. His father isn't calling the shots anymore, so he's going to need a new set of rules to follow, an absent idol to emulate. Sam used to say it was unhealthy, down here though, down here it sounds like the smart thing to do. If he wants to stay off the rack, out of the fiery pit, out of wherever else they can still send him, he has to be a damn good boy. His entire life seems to have been preparation for this moment.

"So I've heard." Alastair smiles, bares his jagged, gaping white teeth, serrated edges, enamel knives sticking out of his pale gray and purple gums. "It's your sense of gratitude I'm more concerned with at the moment. Are you a grateful boy, Deano? You know how to give a proper thanks to the demon who rescued your ass from eternal damnation."

Classic Alastair; sexual sadism at its finest, personality unpredictable at best. The stone mattress is hard against his knees, even with the softness of the baby blanket, the slide of velvet, barely aged flesh. He leans down to look at Alastair's cock, already half interested, withered scales and wrinkles wrong on something abhorrently huge. It nudges up against his cheek, rutting hard enough to make him bleed, for a little of his skin to abrade away. He takes Alastair in and it's nothing new, same old same old, same heat and roughness, same taste of sulfur, same gagging and pain in the back of his throat, muscles burning where they're stretched too wide. Usually Alastair fucks his throat until it's raw, quills extended, scraping every surface bloody, his esophagus a mangled mess by the time he finishes, sulfur flavored semen dripping through the wreckage down to his stomach. This time there aren't any quills to contend with, no pain, just the discomfort of a dick down his throat, the minor annoyance of an ache in his lungs when he doesn't get a chance to breathe. After all the years on the rack he can handle this, he can do this well. He's sucked cocks bigger than Alastair's, that's for sure, one of which has the reputation for killing all women it comes into contact with. He thinks if he were anywhere but hell he could pretend it was his brother's belly his forehead was pressed against, brother's cock far enough in his throat there's a potential risk of him literally swallowing the thing, but hell doesn't allow for fantasies, and Alastair likes to be on Dean's mind twenty four-seven. Alastair says soon he's going to be the little voice inside Dean's head, and Dean believes him.

"Your mouth looks tired." Alastair drags a claw across his lower lip, wipes away the spit that dribbles out and pools around the base of Alastair's dick, smearing wet on the leathery skin. "Why don't you give it a rest?" Alastair pulls his face up and he can do this too, knees pressing flat against the stone as they bare his weight. He mentally braces himself for the uncomfortable slide down, physically there's no preparation for it, it's like being warned a train is about to fly up your ass, doesn't exactly make the process any easier and it's kind of difficult to imagine to begin with. Alastair stops him with a hand and walks his claws up his stomach, nails hooking into the skin below his bellybutton, raking a long, deep line from his hip to his hip. It hurts; Alastair's claws deep enough to touch the surface of an organ, send a queasy shiver of heat to the base of his skull, low down where his neck and head meet. Alastair guides his fingers to the blood and coats them with it, slippery and shiny, redder than he's seen in almost a day.

"I don't get it." He offers his fingers to Alastair; waits for him to lick them clean and sing songs to the taste, praise his mother for producing such a fine son.

"Every good demon knows that blood makes the best lube." Lube is a new development, lube is good. His blood is warm lube as he slicks himself up, stuffs himself full of his own hand, busy with the task of opening his ass for once, so for the first time he doesn't tear and bleed, so for the first time it doesn't hurt. Alastair watches him, unnaturally purple tongue darting out between his shriveled gray lips.

He must make a face when he sinks down, because Alastair laughs, sits upright and kisses his mouth bruised and sensitive, while he sits speared in Alastair's lap, beads of sweat moving from his temples down the curve of his spine.

"Don't worry about it." Alastair thrusts up and it's not entirely awful, which means it's already too fucking bad. "This vanilla sex won't be fun for long." Vanilla sex? He's giving Alastair the cowgirl with his blood to ease the way, fresh rivulets of blood leaking out of a wound on his stomach. "Down here Dean, we fuck like you can't even dream of." ***NC-17 material removed*** "I think I'm going to like keeping you around Dean, my boy." Alastair slurps greedily at the tears on his cheeks, the tears Dean never noticed. "You cry too pretty."

"I hate to disappoint you." Something new and powerful trembles in his chest. "But that's the last time I'm going to cry." He means it, and the cracks and fragments of his battered soul slowly repair themselves, knit back together in an itch beneath his skin he can feel.

"You're on your way." Whispers Alastair, the flickering candles made from human fat giving out with a sizzle and hiss. "Tomorrow, you become someone new."

"Who?" The timid section of his mind screeches, worrying itself sick.

"Someone who will help me bring the world to its knees." He lies on his back, blanket smelling of milk and sweetness, the uncorrupted air of youth, and sleeps.

* * *

In the morning, the light is its brightest, hell shrouded in a film of red. It's akin to being in a darkroom, the same disorienting warp of a maroon colored glow, shadows abnormally magnified. Alastair is like a living shadow, dark all over, but when he walks it isn't silent, his hooves clacking across the flawless glass.

"Up and at 'em Deano." Alastair's claws are already dripping blood. Demons are early risers, if they ever sleep. Somehow, he can't imagine Alastair sleeping. Alastair rests, protests the call of light and wakes, too much work to be done to stay in bed. Demons are creatures of the dark and shadows, it makes sense that they never rest, as much the night as blackness and nightmares. "You don't want to be late for your first day of school." Alastair touches his stomach and leaves blood there, in the intense, humid heat it dries sticky in seconds.

"Did you put a pudding cup in my lunch?" He knows what to come and still doubts he'll be able to go through with it. He can talk the talk but walking the walk is a hell of a lot messier.

"It's not time for jokes Dean. I have a surprise for you." Alastair's said this once before, on the first day he fucked him, two years into his stay. Alastair withdrew the knife where he'd been carving his name on the inside of Dean's skull, grinned his wicked, vicious smile, barbed tongue poking between his teeth and forced his spiny cock right in. Those were the types of surprises Alastair liked, the only kind he knew.

Alastair's place has a basement, unsurprisingly. A demon needs a place to work, refine his skills, amuse himself when he's not torturing souls on the rack. Of course Alastair has a workshop; Dean doesn't expect any less of him. The basement is at the bottom of an enamel staircase, each individual step made of teeth propped up by bones. It's admirable craftsmanship at the least, grotesquely awful at best. Behind a trademark pelvis bone door is the torture chamber, shelves and shelves of Alastair's tools sitting on display. The gleaming steel and rusted metal isn't what catches his attention, because they're old news, he's seen and felt them all before. What draws his eye and morbid curiosity is the soul strung up against the rear wall.

The soul is half mad with loneliness and desperation, sobbing pitifully, tears washing clean streaks on her face. Her skin is almost black with years of dirt and grime, the buildup of her sweat. She looks like hell warmed over and left to sit in its own filth. Her body is stretched too tight over her bones, paper thin and pale. You can't starve to death in hell, you can only eat away at yourself, dissolve tissues until you're the living skeletons the demons are, all bony ribcages and gnarly limbs, skeleton-like fingers. He's been spared this fate so far, forced to die and come back whole again, without the torture of feeling himself wither away. The woman, the soul of what used to be a woman, is starved for contact, reaching out for him, screaming in a language he doesn't understand. He thinks it might be Spanish, he catches snatches of words that he recognizes, but he's staring at the patch of lighter skin on her collarbone; the outline of a cross burned into her tan where a crucifix scorched right off her.

"Welcome to day one of eternity, pick up your razor and begin." Alastair holds his blade in his claws, presents it to him; the greatest honor of Dean's life. That razor has carved out hearts and severed tendons since hell was spawned from the darkness and turmoil. It's one of Alastair's claws torn out and filed down, heated and sharpened to a perfect point. The handle is a new addition, more of the sanded over, polished bone.

"This is yours." He can see himself screaming on the knife's gleaming surface; taste the bitterness of his blood inside his mouth. It's like going back to the rack, waiting for Alastair to slice him into pieces. Alastair is giving him the physical manifestation of his past agony, he supposes it's supposed to be closure or some shit, Alastair's way of making up for the last thirty years.

"Not anymore. You see that handle?" Alastair turns the blade over in his palm and his name is etched into the bone, scratched lovingly in with Alastair's claws. "That's your bone Dean. I took it from your first day here. I knew this moment would come." If he didn't know Alastair so goddamn well, this could almost qualify as a really fucked up romantic gesture. "I could see how weak you were then, but don't you worry, I'm going to make you strong." He'll never let it be said that Alastair isn't thoughtful in his own demonic way. The bone against his skin is overheated, and when he looks at it this time, all he sees is Sam's face staring up at him, with the same disappointed stare his dad gave him throughout his childhood. In hell he's a failure, in a way it's good to know some things never change. "Go on." He's shoved forward, his heels dragging across the floor.

"_Por favor_." He understands that. Pleas are universal, he knows them by the tell tale sobbing hiccups, the cracked and weak inflection of her voice. "_Ayúdame_." The bones under his skin tremble and his grip goes slack, so slack the razor is bound to drop from his hand any second, so slack his fate on the rack will be sealed the second the blade hits the ground.

"I can't." He swallows, the burn of shame low in his throat, relief blooming like daisies in his belly. He's not a monster yet, from the knife Sam smiles up at him.

"Sure you can." A dry tongue probes the inside of his ear, crooning deep past his eardrum. "I saved her just for you; she's been here for thirty years, waiting, don't keep her waiting." Alastair kisses his neck in a near perfect imitation of tenderness. The voice in his head that sounds like Sam tells him to resist; Alastair's hand slithering up his arm, closing his hand tightly around the blade's handle, Alastair's scaly palms bloodying his wrist. "Ah well, maybe in another thirty years." God he's sorry, so fucking sorry but he _can't_. He's not noble, he's not a hero, down here he's only a splintered soul, torn and hemorrhaging at the seams.

With all his weight he falls forward, razor disappearing to the handle, where his fingers sit warm on his removed bone. Blood is a hot, sickly slippery thing, hot as it gushes up the knife, smudging the white-yellow red. The soul doesn't scream, not quite, she makes a choked, startled noise, mouth falling open into a perfect O. She finally does scream, in a high pitched, mournful wail that has him flinching, unable to watch the blood bubbling messily from her wound. Guilt is a ribbon coiling steadily in his chest.

"I'm sorry." He says, even though he's not. Her or him, self-preservation takes precedent over chivalry in hell.

"_Chinga a tu madre_." She spits in his face, her saliva sliding sour down his cheek. She's just made this a little easier.

"Are you going to let her talk to you like that?" Alastair licks the blade clean, frowning.

Her abdomen goes first, cuts open the easiest. Everything inside her slops out, steaming at his feet, blood and discolored fluids pooling around his toes. It's a sickly, sticky feel he associates with his own pain, not someone else's; a deeply personal sensation. He likes this new experience, to be on the other end of the torturing, to be the one holding the blade. He's empowered here, standing in Alastair's basement while a girl screams herself sick. She vomits once, before Alastair instructs him to disconnect her stomach, slice through the tube of muscle connecting it to her throat. She goes quiet, an occasional hiss of escaping air if she opens her mouth. The silence should settle his conscience, instead it provokes it, rubbing raw and irritated in his ears.

By the time he's finished, hours and hours, so long the filtered red light has changed to black, his hands are caked dry with blood. The blood cracks and flutters off his skin like he's shedding scales. On the wall, his victim, [there's really no other word for what she is] dangles lifeless, mangled worse than a person ejected from a car at eighty miles an hour. She's tore up to hell, splayed open and leaking; emptier inside than he is.

"Good job, Dean." Alastair mutters praises in his ear and in a strange, startling gesture, sinks to his knees. His cock is cradled with Alastair's clawed fingers. "I'm real proud of you."

Alastair lets his jaw go slack.

* * *

***NC-17 material removed***

"You're on your own today." Alastair smacks him in the ass, spits casually onto the base of his spine. "Your girlfriend is still available for you to play with."

He can't face her. At night her eyes burn splotches into his skin, her screams dissolve his eardrums, her blood on his face like tears.

"That's alright, I'd rather sleep in." When he sleeps he dreams, of the Impala and good food and Sam, of his brother fucking him _so_ good, better than anything here.

"Sorry Deano, that wasn't part of the deal. I didn't pull you off the rack to let you lie around. You keep up your end of the bargain. If you're tired of that little bitch you are more than welcome to find another." He wonders how that goes, if he's supposed to send in a couple box tops and wait for a new soul to arrive. Maybe there's a catalogue somewhere, a website he can visit where his "perfect soul is only a click away". Eharmony to match him with his ideal victim. They should market shit like that.

"Is there a supermarket I'm supposed to go to? Do I buy them in bulk? Will I need a club card?" Alastair laughs; his laugh is dark and brittle, like cracking cement.

"I'll send for someone to come see you." Alastair laughs again; Dean's beginning to hate the sound. "I hope you have something specific in mind." He wants someone tough, someone who deserves to be here, someone so hardened they won't break. He wants the man he wishes he could have been. Society presumed him a murder, a raging, dangerous psychopath, incapable of human emotions. If that were true his soul wouldn't feel so dirty, inside he wouldn't feel so wrong.

Alastair's house has a balcony, sculpted pure from tooth and nail. It reeks of decomposing molecules, like moldy mushrooms, only sweeter. The balcony overlooks the lake of fire, flames twisting high, rich neon orange. Black bodies are a wave beneath the blaze, turning and tumbling, pushed flat against the glass sides. Their frantic scrabbling is nauseatingly fascinating; a slow motion car crash he can't look away from. The heat radiating from the fire has him sweating, thick lines of perspiration traveling down the back of his neck, the base of his spine, running salty over his mouth. He can taste the sweat when he licks them, with each nervous pursing of his lips.

"So good to see you again, love, and shacking up with Alastair no less."

"Bela." He knows from the tell-tale rustle and flap of withered wings, skin that has the look and texture of paper crumpled into a ball and unfolded back out flat. He recognizes her smell too, the hiss of the snakes that wriggle as her hair and the low rattle of the snake that functions as her tongue. She's the ugliest thing south of this plane of life. Compared to Bela, Alastair is Brad fucking Pitt, though, he supposes that to the demons Bela is beautiful, with her snake hair and dried up breasts, claws hanging sharp off her fingertips. He's going to turn into Bela after he's been down here long enough. His skin will dry and rot, curl in on itself and bunch ugly. He'll grow claws, crooked things that sprout from his calloused, scarred hands and turn him hideous. And when he loses his pretty, he can only hope he doesn't lose Alastair as well. No one wants to keep a toy that's lost its luster, not when there are other ones waiting with fresh coats of paint, firm, tight things that sob and shiver. "Don't tell me, you're the bitch around here who sells the souls?"

"I'm an entrepreneur at heart Dean. If someone's willing to buy it, I'm willing to sell it."

"What do you get out of the soul dealing business? Money isn't worth shit around here."

"I trade for favors. Respect is more valuable than anything up in the land of the living. I have a very elite clientele. I get them what they want; they give me what I want."

"What exactly do you want Bela?" Bela has a child at her side, a pretty, timid little thing. She has tears welled up in her gray-green eyes, a spattering of freckles across her nose and cheeks. She resembles him, he notices stupidly, because Alastair said to become someone new he first has to kill himself. Now he can see it's not just a metaphor and some fucked up form of symbolism.

"Power, plain and simple. Next time I'm topside Dean, my eyes are going to be white." The chains around the little girl's wrists rattle as Bela shoves her forward; her small feet crusted a hundred layers over with dried blood and sand. "Alastair thought you'd want to play with little Lynette while your order is in the mail." Lynette moves soberly to stand by him, her head bowed in perfect submission. "He spoils you Dean. Really he does. Not many souls get to end up here." Bela sighs, rakes her nails through Lynette's tangled red-brown hair. "Alastair has the nicest digs this side of purgatory. You have to be a damn good lay to be invited for a sleepover."

"I'm assuming you tried?" There's a sick vindication in this, the knowledge that he's beat out Bela. Bela could pull one over his eyes in life but here in death, in everlasting torment he has the last laugh.

"Multiple times." Bela nods, all fake nonchalance. He can tell that inside she's seething. "I just wasn't pretty enough for him, or talented enough maybe. The other demons say he's a human lover. He'd rather spend his time in the dark with his collection of souls. The only demons who had regular contact with him were Azazel and Lilith." Yeah, he's certain Azazel and Alastair got along just fine, two fruits from the same fucked up, rapey tree. "And now there's you, his pretty, righteous soul gone dark side. They always said Alastair likes boys the best. I'll give you a few days to think your order over." Bela's wings flap once, twice, three times before she's gone, soaring off into the ink-black sky, so dark no light could ever permeate it fully.

"Are you going to cut me now?" The child sounds dead inside, hollow like an empty egg.

"No, not at the moment, sweetheart." Hell has no water, no liquids, only blood, and he washes the girl's feet with it, wets them fresh and wipes some of the older blood away. It serves a purpose, it keeps him busy, gives him something to occupy his hands. In the basement his first victim hangs up on the wall, watching him as he brings the child in. He can't bring himself to chain her up like that.

"Hi." Lynette waves to the woman, crosses the blood spattered glass floor and sits at her feet, one tiny hand clinging to the woman's ankle, wrapped tightly enough around it that it must be uncomfortable. "My name's Lynette." Lynette says to no one in particular, clearly the woman but her eyes fixed on her own reflection. "What's your name?"

"She doesn't speak English." Lynette tips her face towards him; her eyes are empty, agonizing mirrors. "I'm Dean though. Dean Winchester."

"I don't…" Lynette pauses, pudgy thumb creeping into her mouth. She pulls it out with a wet pop a few seconds later. "I don't think I want to be friends with you, Dean." Lynette looks back up at the woman. "You're gonna be my mommy now, okay? You can brush my hair and tell me stories and I promise I'll be real good. 'Cause if I'm good, then nothing bad can happen anymore. It's a rule." He remembers when life seemed to be that simple, when there were no shades of gray, only defined black and outlined white. The world of an eight-year-old is a straightforward, uncomplicated thing.

He wonders if Lynette believes in Santa Claus or the Tooth Fairy anymore. Down here there isn't much to believe in, just the dark and the blades lodged in your skin.

"I want you to go stand over there, Lynette." Lynette won't let go of the woman's ankle, digs her fingertips in deep. "And close your eyes, there's something I need to do." Alastair will send him back if his hands aren't drenched in blood at the day's end, his entire body ripe and fetid of it. Alastair is a demon who needs his cold hard proof, doesn't have much faith in the honesty. Dean wouldn't either, if he'd been here as long as Alastair had, since there were first souls to earn punishment.

"You're going to hurt her." Lynette uncurls her fingers, plants a single, baby-soft kiss below the girl's knee. "S'okay. I can be good and wait." He shouldn't do this in front of her, it's nothing a kid her age should see, but she's experienced worse, he supposes, a little blood and guts can't traumatize her anymore.

"Close your eyes?" It's not a suggestion, she can do what she wants, he just wants it to be easier for himself. He can work to the sound of a child screaming if he has to.

"Try not to scream. You don't want to scare her." He thinks the girl might understand him, because she seals her lips up tight, presses them together until they're thin and white. Impressively, she's silent as he first slides the knife into her, the muscles in her stomach quivering, tensed against the sharpness of the blade. Her blood slips out, running freely, and he plays with it, half-heartedly tries to catch it in his hands and hold it there, hot and steaming red. He finds no pleasure in it this time, there's no spark of latent enjoyment. He's burdened by the weight of blood on his skin, scratchy with the phantom sensation of it, then the literal dampness. He finishes her off quick, cuts her throat so deep he pierces every tendon, through her trachea and esophagus to boot. The two tubes collapse in her throat with a whooshing sound, spasm before she goes limp. She comes back gasping, torn apart throat knitting itself back together, fibers reconnecting, pulling her together like a grotesque puzzle. "I'm done." He emphasizes the words by lowering the razor. He needs a break.

He passes out face down on Alastair's bed, blood peeling off his skin like flecks of paint. Alastair wakes him later by cleaning the blood away with his tongue, slurping on his hands 'till they're good and wet, all gross and slobbery but clean. Alastair does this more often than he likes, savors the taste of blood mixed with his sweat and flesh. Two days and he's having a hard time accepting this is a sneak peak of his eternity, some slice and dice before one on one as Alastair's fuck toy. He can handle the fucking; it's simple enough, there's a cock and his ass, and sometimes his mouth; a relatively simple equation, no surprises or hidden variables, as straightforward as eighth grade sex Ed.

"Can we do this later? I don't feel like it."

"Why not, we have all of eternity." He hates Alastair's smug, pointy grin, those wicked little fangs. "Did you like your gift?" Alastair's breath is too hot, too sour of stale blood he's licked from other mouths. His stomach churns with something that isn't quite jealousy, a low, uncomfortable fire in his gut.

"She's cute." She's a tiny thing that reminds him of the children he's saved. A few decades ago he'd have scooped her up from a place like this, let her cling tight to the collar of his shirt and carried her away, dropped her off with her sobbing, hot, grateful mother.

"She's darling." The word sounds so wrong being said in Alastair's voice, rolling off his grape juice and bruise purple tongue. "Fresh meat too, practically a virgin. I try not to partake in the purchase of used goods myself, but she's special, wouldn't you say?"

"She's real special." Certainly Alastair notices the apathy in his voice, the strain on his equanimity. Outside giant black things screech and their shadows flicker across the ground, smaller, weaker shadows of liberated souls half-dead fleeing. You're never alone in hell, even when you think you are, someone or something is always off where you can't see, panting hidden in the darkness. "You mind blowing out the candle? I'm tired."

The flame wavers and dies.


	3. Chapter 3

The house is too quiet when he's alone. The silence makes the bones in the walls creak, the hallways echo with the steady pitter patter of blood dripping from the ceilings, leaking from places he doesn't dare go. There are upper and lower levels to Alastair's lair, and aside from the basement, he hasn't left the solitude of Alastair's bedroom once. He sleeps best during the day, alone on Alastair's bed of stone, breathing in the putrefied sweet of baby skin.

"You seem depressed." He's too busy picking dried blood off his skin to listen. He digs his nails into his skin, longer than they used to be, and rakes them downwards, scrapes crusted blood and long strips of his flesh from his torso. "Are we going to have to talk about this? Please say no. I've had my fill of crying bitches today." Alastair, ever the sensitive romantic.

"No." A scaly, withered palm closes around his wrist.

"Come here." He lands solidly in Alastair's lap, Alastair's cock half hard and heavy against the small of his back, under his ass. "You are not the happy little soul you should be." Alastair holds him down when he struggles, grinds his hips up slow and dirty, his dick too hard and hot for Dean to be comfortable. "I let you off that rack, you should be all smiles." He's the one who grinds this time, rotates in tiny circles. "You need to loosen up, get those pesky morals off your chest. Go play with Lynette, I promise you'll have fun."

"I'm having fun." ***NC-17 material removed***

"Fucking slut." Fucking Alastair isn't fucking without dirty talk, slut and whore and bitch, claws forcing his head to awkward angles, Alastair licking the edges of his mouth so his tongue can slide in, slimy like an eel. "I'm going to cut your heart out and eat it, then face fuck your dead skull." Believe it or not, the sentence is supposed to be a turn on.

Alastair won't do it, as much as he wants to. He's a demon of his word, Alastair is. He's downright fucking saintly about keeping a promise. If anything, it's the hypocritical morality down here he hates the most. Alastair's thrusts get ragged and rough, constant friction irritating the patch of skin Alastair drags his dick over. "I wish I was inside you, Dean." Alastair whispers into his hear his own version of sweet nothings, little loveless declarations. "Fucking your tight ass raw, make you bleed for old time's sake. Huh? Get you screaming good and loud while I pound you face first into the mattress." He watches Alastair's dick twitch, more glad than he's ever been that it isn't inside him. ***NC-17 material removed*** "Bela's stopping by today." Alastair wipes himself clean on Dean's lower back. "You go ahead and pick out something nice."

"Will do." Alastair's semen darkens the blanket where he rubs it, itchy blackness gone from his skin, tingling with the come's acidity, a slow acting chemical burn.

The woman in the basement, who in his head he calls Maria after his mother, has reduced her chains to bloody, red clumps, covered in layers of skin and muscle in various states of decomposition. The chains are ingenious on Alastair's part, the more you struggle the more pieces of yourself you lose, the longer you stay still the tighter they get, until one way or another all that's left of your wrist is whittled down bone. He'd learned to bite his lip and watch his skin slop off in layers; Maria prefers to fight until her bones crack and splinter.

Lynette is sitting at Maria's feet like always, stabbing herself repeatedly through the center of her hand and pleading.

"Sing it again, mommy."

"_Sana sana colita de rana_." Maria sobs, bloody chest heaving, screaming as Lynette hugs her, rests her bloody little palm on Maria's hip. There's something wrong inside the child, a problem soul deep. Therapy might be able to fix it, maybe not, but there's no therapy down here, hurt and sickness twist themselves around in rusty little coils, adding to the perpetual state of disrepair of the soul. "_Si no sansas hoy_." Lynette leaves small, red handprints on every inch of Maria she clings to. "iSansarás mañana/i." The lyrics dissolve into tears and shuddery breathes.

"Let go of her Lynette." He can't look at it, the sad, sadistic imitation of a little girl, broken and different, built up to withstand and muddle through.

"Are you taking her away?" Lynette traces the hole in her hand as it closes, makes those breathless, miserable kid sounds; a series of keening whines in her throat.

"I'm taking you both away." Maria falls to the floor when he unhooks her chains, scrabbles up and stands unsteady, bare toes curling inwards towards the soles of her feet. "Hold her hand." Turns out he doesn't need to remind Lynette, her hand has already wormed its way into Maria's. "Walk." The chains would make a great BDSM leash, if he were into that. Six days in hell and his sex drive yearns for the straight and narrow. Missionary would be nice.

"Where are we going?"

"Nowhere you want to be." Lynette picks a femur off the ground, drags it behind her in the sand.

"Good morning, darling." Bela's speaking to him, but she's smiling at Lynette, pokes her snake tongue out to frighten her. "What can I do for you?"

"I have some rentals I want to exchange." Maria tugs at her cuffs and blood rushes down the length of the chain. Maria's blood is a dark red today, almost purple from lack of oxygen, all the air she's wasting with her cries.

"Done with her already?" Bela puts a finger under Maria's chin, keeps her head level, presses back her lips to inspect her teeth. Checking the goods, examining the merchandise, souls are things down here, insignificant pieces of property. It makes him wonder if he belongs to Alastair or if he's his own person now. "I worked hard to find the perfect girl for you. Alastair was very specific." Bela cuts a line in Maria's cheek with her index claw. "Bleeds easy, pretty—" Bela says pretty like it's obvious, like ugly souls don't cry and scream right. "—tragic back story, and most importantly, a virgin. He wanted to be sure you got a nice Catholic girl."

"She can't be too nice if she's here." He's allowed to feel superior, he's here out of selfishness, but it's a selfless selfishness, his personal need that happened to be noble. If he were strong enough to live without his brother, he wouldn't be watching a young woman's blood trickle into the sand.

"I can guarantee you we've both done worse." There's blood on Bela's fingertip, she traces the outline of the cross on Maria's neck, paints it and leaves it to dry. He gets a buzz under his skin watching it, a hum of anger, watching her force her bloodied fingers into Maria's mouth and laugh, tip her head up further to kiss her. Bela kisses wet, kisses like she means it, spears that snake straight into Maria's mouth, down her throat. Any other person would probably find this hot, girl on demon-girl action, he feels nothing, the dull cool of apathy in the pit of his stomach. "You're free to go." Bela's kissed Maria's mouth bruised, red and dripping. "No one I'm selling to is interested in sloppy seconds." Maria's chains rattle on the ground and she runs, slipping and sprinting through the sand, tumbling down dunes until she's out of sight, a vague shape in the ever present shadows.

"Pretty nice of you to let her go like that." He stares at one of Maria's footprints, each individual toe, the indentation of her heel.

"Hardly. She's worse off out there than she is on the rack." Something screeches out of sight. "What would you like me to find for you Dean? Another pretty girl? One who speaks English this time? You seem the type to want to understand her pleading." Bela really isn't much different from who she was in life, she even resembles herself. He suspects that her appearance isn't just a side effect of hell; it's what she always was on the inside, her inner evil manifested onto her face.

"Can I see what you have in stock? I don't want to wait." He ties Maria's chains around Lynette's wrist, like he did with balloons for Sam when he was little, too young to be trusted not to let go of his balloon, and not quite old enough not to cry about it afterwards. He ties the other end to the bones at the start of bridge across the lake of fire. "Wait here Lynette."

"You'll want to hurry if you're going to leave her there." Bela giggles at a delightful secret. "Something might take her before we get back."

"I don't want her anymore." He won't hurt her, as much as everyone wants him to, but she's temptation, all the innocent pieces of himself. "How far are we going?" The bridge creeks and sways, bones charred past brittle, yet somehow they manage to support his and Bela's weight.

"Not too far, a place that's familiar to you. I have my own little section on the rack; it's where I keep all unsold items. You pick out anyone you want dearie and send Alastair my love when you get home."

"You're a heartless bitch Bela."

"Oh love," Bela laughs at him, her snake hair laughing too. "You think you're any better?"

"Probably not." Bela's wings tear beneath his hands when he tugs them, does his best to rip them at the seams, separate the sheets of skin and muscle from her back, crack the hollow bird bones with a firm snap. She howls at him, claws his face.

"Forget Alastair," Bela rages, each snake baring its fangs. "I'm going to cut off your head and mount it on my wall."

"He wouldn't let you." He kicks her in the chest, hard enough to feel her ribs against the sole of his foot, her withered breasts squished and firm. "I've got more power down here in six days than you had in your hundred years bitch." Bela falls into the fire screaming. Her skin burns away in a brilliant burst of orange and blue, the snakes in her hair wailing as they disintegrate until all that's left of Bela and them are blackened skeletons, bones for Bela and one long, straight spine with a skull for the snakes. "See ya, Bela. I'll let Alastair get my souls for me from now on." Bela raises one scorched middle finger at him.

"You killed her." Lynette laughs that high pitched, sweet-as-sugar giggle of a school girl, sunshine and ponies and sparkles wrapped up into one sound. "It was funny."

"It was pretty funny, wasn't it?" The pissed look on Bela's face sticks in his head, infects his blood with laughter. Lynette stares at him with big, amused and accusing eyes, the confused look of a kid. It's how he used to look at his dad after hunts, when he was too young to fight, but old enough to watch, touch the droplets of blood gleaming on his dad's chin.

"When is she coming back?" She's too little to know real death is permanent. To her you die and reappear a few seconds later, reanimated in a repaired body.

Lynette's cheeks are silky where he holds them, braces his thumbs along the line of her jaw.

"She's not. I promise you'll never see her again."

Lynette's neck snaps like a delicate, tiny twig. She falls to the side weightlessly, body tumbling off the edge of the bridge. The chain around her wrist keeps her from hitting the fire, instead she hangs, her head a lolling, heavy thing. She comes back to life just in time to scream as skeletal hands grab her ankles, sear her flesh with their heat and pull her down, rip her arm messily from its socket, while she cries for the mother she'll never see again. He should feel bad for what he's done, but he doesn't.

He walks off, behind him the sky blazes black and red. He thinks Alastair calls for him, so he puts his weight on the balls of his feet and runs, follows crisscrossing trails of claws and hoofs and footsteps through the sand.

Night is darkest. There is a blood red, pseudo-sunset in hell, a sorry rendition of reality. The lightning flickers bright, shines up the entire world and the lights go out, as quick and final as the flip a switch, one two three and off. Things come alive in the night, things he's never seen. There are giant creatures, as tall as buildings, slime and blood dripping from their teeth. They are monsters from childhood nightmares, spidery beasts made of jagged razors, big enough to touch the sky it seems, reach right up and eat the sun whole. He told his brother things like these weren't real when they were little, hiding in a fort made of pillows beneath the bed. There's nowhere to hide from them, they can smell his scent on the wind, turn their lumbering heads in his direction and move faster than they should be able to, barely a whisper across the ground. They're easily distracted, however, and focus on the soul of a man and woman on the ground, fucking wilder than animals, caught up in the bite and bleed of the mating ritual of hell.

The breeze blows cold out in the open, drives away the constant heat, prickles the hair on his arms and the back of his neck. The desert distends onwards, hundreds and thousands and infinite open miles of it, the shapes of mountains to the west. He has nowhere to go and nowhere he'd rather be. He seeks solace beneath an enormous skull, the skin and hair picked clean off by scavengers, by animal and fallen man and demon alike. The old Dean, a Dean only alive in his memories, would have kept vigil through the night, paranoid by the manic laughter and scratch of feet. He's a different Dean, not better, not worse, just no sameness, rearranged deep in his soul, and he sleeps easy, dreams of Bela's angry screaming for his lullaby, almost restless without a body draped on his back.

He's awaked by snarling and giggling, the stench of sulfur thick like sweat and body odor.

"Here pretty. Pretty pretty." One of the demons coos to him. They're low level demons, only a step or two away from souls, common black skin and red bug eyes with black cat pupils, the deformed mouths of parasitic insects. "Come on out and play with us."

"Fuck that." The teeth in the skull are sharp, hollow inside, he breaks two off with his hands, brandishes them the best he can. A hand reaches for him, he slices into it at the elbow, forces the tooth through bone. It bleeds a sort of corrosive acid, sulfuric acid most likely, and it burns him, fat red blisters welling up from his skin.

"Darling, give it up, don't make us hurt your pretty face."

The smallest demon slithers in through the skull's empty eye socket, grabs him by the ankle and drags him out kicking and screaming, his nails ripping off where he uses them as resistance to keep from being pulled out, scraping loud against the skull.

"Me first." Each of them is hard, sporting demon sized cocks nowhere near as frightening as Alastair's, not a barb or spike to be seen.

"Boys, we can all go at once."

_No_.

The grains of sand are sharp as glass; they cut wide little streaks in his knees, in his thighs, his belly as he twists about. If he could get on his feet he'd have a chance, he could go down fighting, take a couple of them with him first.

***NC-17 material removed***

The bones of the skull creak with a new burden, more demons, more guests to this private party.

"Alastair." The demons that aren't currently pounding his ass and throat raw drop to their knees. "Is this yours?" Oh yes, he's Alastair's, only Alastair's, so very glad to be Alastair's at the moment.

Alastair stares at him, rests his head in the palm of his hand, strokes a claw underneath his nose.

"Nope. I don't mean to interrupt gentlemen. I'm in the mood for some entertainment." _Alastair please_. He deserves this, brought it about with his stupidity. "Not to criticize your efforts, but only one in each end? You'd be amazed what the human body can take into itself." _Fuck you Alastair__._ Two, three cocks in him at once and he's going to pass out, split open past the point of no return, demons inside him and carving into him, blades and teeth sinking into his flesh; an orgy of torture. All the while he's watching Alastair watch him, the delighted little grin of victory, Alastair's hand sliding down to touch himself in time with Dean's irregular, dying gasps. "Very nice." A slip of a claw through his windpipe kills him, cuts off his air and chokes him, his throat swallowing uncontrollably in desperation for air, squeezing around the demon's cock tight enough that it comes, its semen sucked down into his lungs, drowning him.

He's on his back when his body is done mending itself, light flooding into the sky, lightning shining in elegant lines; cracks in the surface of a frozen lake. He's not alone, Alastair's feet tapping impatiently by his head, hooves making the ground vibrate, clip clopping just like a goat's. _The first Billy goat trotted across the bridge, clip clop clip clop_.

"Alastair." He rolls over, kisses Alastair's hooves again and again and again.

"Did we learn our lesson today?"

"Yes."

"Good. Remember, Dean." Alastair pulls him to his feet; hand in his hair, sharp and painful. "You're nothing down here without me. If you leave again, I'm not coming for you, and you'll go through worse than that."

"Yes sir." He nuzzles in close, Alastair expects him to, pets him fondly on the top of his head.

"Let's go home."

The dismembered limbs and decapitated heads from the six demons litter the floor.

* * *

The sight of the rack has his heart beating faster, his body breaking out in a cold sweat. The space where he used to hang sits empty, the teeth and skin and parts taken out of him decomposing on the sand, old and fresh meat stinking, bones picked clean and rubbed smooth by particles in the wind. One week ago, exactly, he was up there too, watching the lightning and hoping for permanent death. It seems like another lifetime since then.

"Would you like to pick, Dean?" Alastair gestures at the endless space, at every wriggling body, at the chorus of screams.

"Yeah." He's a kid in a human candy store, looking back to Alastair for approval. He decides on a man half a mile to the east. He's a big guy, burly and overweight, beer belly clashing with the huge bulges of his biceps and forearms, the curve of his arm muscles, the thick tendons bulging in his neck. "Him." The man is quiet, the only one who isn't screaming. He looks at Alastair and doesn't flinch, spits a string of white saliva to the ground and meets Dean's eyes, unafraid. He should be afraid, he should be trembling. Dean feels no sympathy for him, but he isn't sure if he's able to be sympathetic for anyone anymore.

"Good choice. He's going to be fun."

The victim has a tattoo of a skull with a dagger through the mouth that's framed in barbed wire, definitely a prison tat. This kind of guy might have made him angry in the real world, sure as hell made other people angry or else he wouldn't be down here. Hate is life, hate is hell, hate is the driving force behind this dark world below the ground.

"What the fuck do you want?"

"To make you scream." Alastair laughs with him, his chest warming over with pride. He got Alastair to laugh with him, not at him or his extensive pain.

It's disappointingly easy to break prison guy. He cuts between the bones of his ribs, pierces the muscles that help hold in his lungs. Alastair scrapes a new drawing of a skull into the back of the man's head with his claws, feeds Dean the strips of wet skin. They have the ox of a guy bawling in minutes. He stabs him in the beer gut to shut him up.

"I'm sorry today went the way it did, Dean. You can't always pick winners." Alastair rests his fingers on the back of his neck, over the bump where the top of his spine is closest to the surface of his flesh.

"I didn't think the bitch would cry."

"I'll make it up to you." Alastair will fuck him savagely tonight; they'll go at it vicious. They have a ways to walk, retrace the faint outlines of Alastair's hooves and his feet, the circles of his toes and the horseshoe shape of Alastair's. Alastair guides him in a different direction, to the top of a shifting dune. "I find this place has a certain atmosphere about it." There are bodies hanging in the sky, rows and rows and rows of them, suspended by giant meat hooks, their blood dripping into a river of blood.

The blood is fresh here, liquid and steaming, rich with the smell of salt and minerals in the human body. Alastair bends at the river's shore and dips in his hand, collects a scoop of the blood and drinks, fat droplets rolling down his arm.

"Who are they?" The souls are so dirty they're black, coated in dried blood and dirt and sulfur. The grime is thick enough on them he could put his finger to their skin and wipe places clean, draw patterns on their skin, like a kid tracing pictures on a fogged over window. Sam used to practice his ABC's in the Impala on cold nights, writing in the condensation, spelling _hi_ and _Dean_ and _Sam_.

"This is where the souls no one has use for go. That girl." Alastair points to something that might have been a girl once, a girl with strawberry blonde hair and full breasts, hips too wide set for her to be delicate, shoulders broad enough to give her a sturdy, athletic look. "she's from fourteenth century Europe. She died of the plague." Alastair's face is fond and reminiscent. "The Black Death was beautiful Dean. Europe said it was a plague from God. It wasn't. It was a plague from us. We roamed the earth then and they died like flies, dropped where they stood. I was a flea for a week. I infected hundreds, just hopped from one person to the other. The sight of those black buboes was delicious. Him" A man thin enough to be a skeleton twitches at the sound of Alastair's voice, his ribs nearly poking through his skin, all of him unhealthily bony. "He's my very own heart of darkness. He was a chief you know, used to practice black magic. It tugged at the strings of my heart to have to put him up there. He showed so little potential it was embarrassing."

"So this is the equivalent of a land fill?" The souls are too worn out to scream, above him there is only the occasional half muted moan, a cough that sends blood spattering down. "You bring 'em here when you're bored?"

"It's a tad more complicated than that. Get on your knees." He knows where this is going. Alastair already has a hand on himself, supports the weight of his cock in his right hand. "Oh holy father in heaven" Alastair's mouth is shaped with sarcasm. "Fuck you and the high horse you stand on." Alastair starts to piss on him, stream hitting him square in the center of his forehead. Alastair pisses acid; he can hear his skin burning, smell the smoke, his bones bubbling inside his skull. "I baptize you, Dean Winchester." The acid dribbles over his lips. They tingle and slosh off, liquid as soup. Alastair adjusts the flow and gets his chest, dissolves the skin over his heart, burns right through the thick layer of bone. His heart beats in steady palpitations, squeezing bloody and dainty, the prettiest thing in hell he's ever seen. "The eyes are not here." Alastair recites, pissing on the line of his throat when he tilts his head back. Everything hurts, searing and quivering, burning burning, fire crawling across him. "In this valley of dying stars." His outer skin is completely gone, the burn six layers deep. "In this hollow valley. This broken jaw of our lost kingdom." Alastair has him open his mouth; he tastes the burn and the pain of it, the sulfur and death. "In this last of meeting places. We grope together." He wants to scream, but he can't, his throat blistered away. "And avoid speech, gathered on this beach of the tumid river." He's mostly blood, a loose structure of bones and scraps of muscle.

Alastair pushes him into the bloody river. The blood tastes too sweet, rotted over and expired, hot on what's left of his skin. He's not alone in the river, around him there is movement, air bubbles rising from below him. He imagines sharks with three mouths, bigger than a mountain, prehistoric beasts from Sam's old school books. He catches a snatch of a gray-pale forearm, flesh swollen and stretched near splitting. There are people in the water with him, blood laden souls.

A puffy hand ghosts his ankle, fat, sausage fingers too big to properly grip hold. It's enough of a warning through and he swims for the shoreline, body healing as he goes.

"Son of a bitch." He spits blood, climbs his way up onto the sand. "You could have warned me about the river zombies." They continue to reach for him, too weak to drag themselves from the blood.

"You had to pass the test, if I'd told you that would be cheating." Alastair helps wipe his face clean.

"I don't get it."

"The reason they didn't drag you down Dean" Alastair kisses the nape of his neck, licks blood and salt from him. "They're tragic souls. They can only latch onto good."

He dips his foot into the river once more, and sure enough their hands glide off him, as if repelled by an invisible force.

* * *

He has nubs of horns growing from the sides of his skull, curling crooked from the skin above his ears. They're tiny things, his horns, misshapen capital L's pointed at the top, the consistency and color of bone.

"What are you looking at?" Alastair hates early mornings, the bright red light that accompanies it. Sometimes it's almost bright enough to illuminate the landscape, give a peak of the mountain tops in the distance, of the desert stretching on and on and on. He envisions some sort of forest along the mountain side, stick thin trees stretching hundreds of feet tall, gray and black bark with moving branches.

"Nothing." His horns are humiliating, small and immature compared to Alastair's. Alastair has a rack of horns on his head that rival the rack itself, looming and impressive, as intimidating as chains of steel and blood dripping to the sand like water from a melting icicle. He wants to file them off, chip and saw away down to his bone, past it so they can't grow back, carve in until his blade touches his brain and scoop the bone away. He wants to make his face messy with his blood while Alastair watches, offers him tips throughout the morbid routine.

He doesn't look quite like himself anymore, not really. The horns detract from the humanness of his features and his skin is darkening, gray beneath what used to be a tan. He's shriveling up too, drying out, withering like a raisin in the sun, the smoothness of his forehead a thing of the past. Worst of all are his teeth, the pointy things they've become, unkempt and growing, elongating past an inch each. He cuts the inside of his mouth if he isn't careful, tastes his mistake with the tang of his blood, pokes his tongue from between his lips to share the drops with Alastair. He's ugly because hell is ugly and he and demons and deranged souls are part of it, grotesque extensions of the bloody, living sand. He kind of likes it though, this highest honor, the stub of a tail unfurling little by little each day from his back.

"I know what you're thinking about." Alastair shimmies down, stealthy and serpentine, teeth gnawing lovingly on his incipient tail, tongue swiping across the tip. Alastair doesn't read his mind anymore, he says he doesn't need or want to. Dean believes him. "I like them."

"You do?" Alastair chose him for his pretty, he told him so, composed fucked up, sadistic odes to his eyes as he carved him out, to the fluttery arrangement of his lashes, or the perfect placement of his lips, the way they shone with blood and saliva during the lightning crackles. "I think they'll make me look badass when they grow in." He leans over the side of the bed to stare at the floor made of glass and mirrors and sees that his tongue has changed too. It's half forked, red as the blood sitting on the mantel, a miniscule hole at the very top, the place where his tongue sticks out the farthest. "What's the hole for?"

"You'll find out." He loves Alastair's surprises, they have never disappointed him, always just for him, to brighten up his day. "If you're done fretting over your appearance, Princess, we have souls to spoil."

"Shut up." He shoves Alastair low in the stomach, cuts him open with his new claws, his fingernails overgrown and honed to mini razors by Alastair's blade. "Let me get that for you." He feigns sincerity and cleans the blood away with his mouth, then opens for Alastair's cock when it rises hard and throbbing towards the blood dimmed sky.

* * *

He can never seem to run fast enough. His feet tread on sand sharper than glass, his blood spread across the living desert. He smells his sweat, tastes adrenaline, molecules of panic.

"You can't run forever." The demons on his tail are tiny slug-like things without faces, only razor sharp teeth and two holes in the center of where their faces should be. They rely on smell, following his scent. He can't ditch them, even if he stands downwind. Their noses are sharper than a bloodhound's, but instead of blood or sweat or hair they smell whatever comprises an individual's soul. They're fixed on him and they won't stop until they catch him.

He trips over the half buried skeleton of a young child, breaks two toes on its small, bleached white skull.

"There you go baby." The slug things swarm him, oozing slime that hardens into a kind of shell; a restraint that holds him down, crusts over his muscles to stop them from moving. They don't exactly talk to him, whisper hoarsely out of their nostrils. The slugs are butter yellow and puffy with moisture, fluids secreted beneath their skin. They are a breed he's never seen before, freshly spawned from parts of hell unknown, barely big enough to see, the size of a baby's thumb. They fit in him so easy it's almost a joke, sliding in slicker than a condom covered in lube. It has him laughing, how badly they fail at this, sliding moist in and out of his ass, over a dozen of them, wriggling in him in their own form of rape. Come the fifth minute of fucking, they change, expand and swell, larger and thicker than such little things should be. He's split in two, ripped at the seams, plugged achingly, gorgeously full, slugs growing to ten times their normal size. Damn it all to hell, he's getting off on it, being held down and slithered over, things moving around inside him and tearing him apart.

There's blood on the backs of his thighs again, seeping out of his hole, dribbling from the gaping wound on his back, where the slugs have separated his body into two sections.

"No more, oh God no more." He's properly wrecked, panting at the sting.

The slugs wheeze in their version of laughter.

"Eight of us haven't gone for a ride yet."

They go for rides more than once, over and over. He's sloppier than the holes in a runny piece of Swiss cheese.

"You about done here Dean?" Alastair steps out of the shadows, erect and smiling.

"By all means, go ahead." Alastair kills the slug things easy, with swipes of his claws. They sever and gush clear liquid. He helps when he can stand again, his fucked out ass and lower torso stitched together, remade as tight as the day he was born, as tight as Alastair likes him.

"You could have been good in porn." Alastair sucks face like he means it, jealous and angry as Dean wants. There is nothing quite like some imaginary gang rape for foreplay. Who knew Dean Winchester would have a rape fetish some day.

"Only if you were my director."

Alastair fucks him atop the bodies of the shredded slugs.

* * *

"What do you know about Ruby?"

He asks Alastair one morning, a very special morning, his thighs powerful while he rides Alastair. ***NC-17 material removed***

"What do you want to know?" Alastair has his arms folded leisurely behind his head, hands cupped behind his head, spread out and watching him, white eyes glazed over whiter, half asleep. Alastair's never fully awake in the early mornings, always half asleep. Alastair is always up so, so early but Dean beats him to it, rising earlier than any sun. When he wants to fuck before he goes to the rack he has to climb aboard and get himself off.

"Where is she? I know she has to have been sent down here. I want to give that bitch what's coming to her." He's looked for her on the rack these last ten years, hoped to catch sight of her ugly face, the smashed and gnarled tip of her nose, her skin a blotchy red and black.

"I don't know where she is but I know where she used to be." Alastair closes his eyes, yawning. "In Lilith's bed."

"Really?" He always thought he got the tough lesbian vibe from Ruby.

"Those two were together for centuries. Ruby used to worship her as a human. There isn't a sweeter love story ever told than one between a bitch and its master." He laughs, the blanket beneath his knees soaked entirely in his blood, his skin covered in it. "I thought Lilith was going to hunt her down for going AWOL. I'd hunt you down if you betrayed me. I'd want to hear you scream one last time."

"I'd scream long and loud for you." He curves himself forward to get the right angle, doubled over Alastair, their faces almost touching. He's starting to look like Alastair these days. His horns are bigger, thicker, more than the width of his thumbs put together, tripled in length. His claws are badass too, as long as Alastair's and his skin is that lovely shade of midnight black, the shadows all around him. "I'd deserve it, anything you had to do to me."

"She didn't you know. Lilith didn't look for Ruby once. I admire that about her, that bitch doesn't give a crap about anyone, especially the girl sharing her bed. That's the kind of demon I want to serve beside. I'd give you up Dean, if I had to, for the good of hell. I'd toss you right into the lake of fire; watch your pretty face burn."

He moans involuntarily, his nerves over stimulated.

"I know you would." He'd kill Alastair too. He dreams about it sometimes, slitting Alastair's throat with his own razor, dragging his body through the sand, chaining him somewhere no one could ever reach him, too high up in the sky for wings. The lightning would strike through the center of Alastair's eyes, fry him to a crisp. He dreams of Alastair vulnerable, he dreams of making Alastair cry blood from every inch of his skin, from beneath his claws and the soles of his hooves. He could rub himself with Alastair's blood, the best facial he'll ever know. He's even harder just picturing it.

"Hurry it up." The son of a bitch yawns at him, stretches his arms above his head. "I'd like to go back to sleep."

"Sorry to be such an inconvenience to you." Alastair doesn't mean it, smiles tiny in the corners of his mouth, cock pressing up harder, nudging forward into him if he pulls back.

"You're never an inconvenience." He shivers all over. "None of this would be possible without you." He doesn't understand, but he doesn't care because he's coming, messy and thick on himself, on Alastair.

* * *

The demon Alastair lives in a castle constructed from the bones of the dead and tortured, the stripped bodies of the damned. The land here in the lowest part of hell reeks of death, the salt and bitter of blood where it runs fresh and boiling in the river. The screams are quietest near Alastair's palace, dark beings scurrying past in the dark, shuffling silent over the sand in leaping bounds, twisting and cavorting. They flee from him, some of them running on all fours, others sprinting on two feet, hooves and toes and claws moving in tandem. Alastair does not come to meet him. Alastair does not seem to notice his presence. Inside Alastair's home there is the faintest movement, the flickers of candles through the closed windows, glass reflecting the red and black and sallow orange-red of the sand. One of the windows gives him view of Alastair's bedchamber, where he can detect the faint glimmer of Dean Winchester's soul.

The Dean he sees is not the Dean he knows. Dean's skin is charcoal black, scabbed over into disorganized scales, the pattern of desert lizards. Dean has horns growing from the sides of his head, long, gnarled bones that match the color of his claws, the bones of his fingers growing past his fingernails. Dean is a disfigured simulation of his old soul. Dean is lying flat on his back, one leg hooked on Alastair's right shoulder, hands bracing on the bed as Alastair pounds into him. Alastair fucks Dean so hard the wall rattles with the force, the very foundation of the house rocking, bones dislodging and sliding back. Dean has fallen; under any other circumstance, he would be ordered to leave him here to wallow in his debauchery. Even if Dean weren't needed, he would bring him along regardless, clutch his buried soul and hold it tight.

Dean's eyes are blacker than the shadows of hell, the darkest color Castiel has seen in hell yet.

"Who the hell are you?" Dean shields his face from Castiel's light, spits out acid through a hole in the tip of his tongue. The acid falls on the tips of his wings but does not burn.

"He's here to take you away Dean." The words rattle Dean to his bones and he lunges at Castiel, sinks his claws into his chest and recoils as though he has been burned.

Alastair is a giant, menacing at over seven feet tall. He is larger than Castiel, larger than his brothers and sisters, the largest force of evil he has yet seen in hell. Alastair makes no move to shelter Dean, to protect him, his white eyes focused on Castiel's sword.

"Take me where?" Dean is small beside Alastair, smaller than he was only moments before, curling in on himself, slinking closer to his master's feet. "I don't want to go."

"I know." Alastair pets Dean's head, stands him up to kiss him. He cannot watch, revulsion burning hotter than the bubbling sulfur in his soul. He will not watch this. His blade slides through the hardened flesh of Alastair's arm, through the ossified sulfur that forms his bones. Alastair's arm falls off limp, shrivels up to nothing on the floor, a twig thin bone covered in paper thick skin.

Dean is nearly too warm to touch, his body searing, fire and sulfur boiling in his blood. It hurts to see him this way, more than it would had Castiel rescued him from the rack, seen Dean torn apart and bleeding. That would have been infinitely easier to bear.

There are severed heads mounted on spikes along the path leading to the bridge across the lake of fire. The two closest to the femurs that begin the bridge are freshest, the sand beneath the pikes wet and red.

"I put those there." Dean struggles against his grip, snarling as he flies, hell a sandy, bloody blur below them. "Your head's going to join them." Dean's voice has changed to an inflection Castiel cannot pinpoint.

"Shh." One touch quiets the restlessness of Dean's freshly malicious mind. "Oh Dean." He wishes he could have met the Dean he knows, the Dean who loves his car and his brother, who sleeps with guns beneath his pillows and silver flasks tucked cool against his hip. He would have liked to speak to that Dean. His wings twitch in disparity but his course through the sky doesn't falter. Dean was a good man once and he will be again. Somewhere deep, somewhere private, somewhere innocence goes to die he can hear Dean's soul screaming. Dean is all he knows that is not the arbitrary workings of the world. Through Dean he has seen television, tasted ketchup sweet as sugar, held a baby in his arms. He wants to see Dean restored, to watch him eat and smile again.

He flies onward to rejoin his brothers at the river's bend, where the last futile army of demons is being laid to waste. By the time he arrives they will be little more than piles of bones and mounds of decomposing flesh. Dean comes to life suddenly, twisting and spitting in his hands. He wrenches himself free and falls, down and down and down into the darkness, landing somewhere in the sand. Castiel follows him but when he reaches the ground Dean is nowhere to be seen, only a faint trail of blood leading to the west.

He finds Dean after two miles of scouring the terrain. Dean's been ambushed by demons, his organs ripped out, abdomen and chest slit open, intestines dragging behind him, coated in dirt. Dean drags himself on his belly like a snake, uses his claws for traction. It is pitiful to watch, to see how low Dean has sunk, reduced to crawling for a demonic master.

"Leave me." Dean coughs sulfur and blood, stringy bits of his innards.

"I'm here to free you." Dean won't let him touch, kicks up sand and rolls, spreading sand further in his thoracic cavity.

"I don't need to be freed." Dean is disillusioned; Dean has always been disillusioned about some aspect of his life. Dean has a subconscious craving for stability, hell as offered this to him for decades. Dean's skin begins to reassemble and soon he will try to run, inevitably he will fail. Castiel will pull him to the surface in the midst of a tantrum worthy of a child.

"This isn't where you belong." Dean's face feels softer, scales shed in this weakness. "Hell has changed you."

"Hell doesn't change anyone, not really." Dean's ribs click back together one by one. "We're all like this on the inside. People are awful creatures, they're worse than demons. At least demons don't pretend to be noble; they don't try and hide their evil. Demons are the most honest beings in the world. We're bad inside, broken maybe, but we never lie about it. Our depravity is straightforward." He can see a glimpse of the man Dean was in the words. Dean has thought this many times, alone in the dark, his brother snoring beside him in bed.

"You say words you don't understand."

"You're the one who doesn't understand." Deans escape attempts are feeble, laden down with his burden. "I don't want to go. I belong here."

"You belong in the land of the living." Dean succumbs beneath his fingertips, losing consciousness, muscles going slack. Dean is a dead, pliable weight easy to carry.

"I'm already dead." Dean says, eyelashes fluttering, features morphing from black and warped to normal, shedding his outer, evil skin layer by layer. This Dean is dying, his goodness reborn.

The sun is bright against the blue afternoon sky.


	4. Chapter 4

He doesn't hear screaming.

The world around him is cold, so cold his teeth chatter and goose bumps prickle on his skin.

It's almost too cold to breathe.

He can't breathe. He _can't_ breathe, trapped in a box that smells of pine and bitter dirt, confined in an earthly prison. He must be dreaming, only in his dreams is he ever cold, except there's no Alastair. Alastair is always in his dreams, Alastair is everywhere, he's part of Alastair, an extension of finely crafted evil. He's like one of the fingers torn off Alastair's hand, wriggling with his own movement but powerless without the rest of Alastair, without direction.

"Alastair?" He speaks in croaks, gasping in his learned tongue. Alastair spoke English but the demons have a language of their own. Alastair taught it to him with the patience of a school teacher, pointed to different organs and told him the words. Alastair's native language was one he'd never heard of before, something predating time, further back then written languages could account for.

Alastair doesn't answer. It's probably a game. Alastair's buried him far down in hell where parasitic and carnivorous worms are going to tear him apart so Alastair can fuck his mostly eaten remains, the bones of his picked clean skeleton. He waits, chest burning, and catches sight of one of his hands in the dark. His hand isn't black and withered, the hand of something dead. His skin is smooth, molded perfectly over the bones of his knuckles, alive and healthy, tan where he hasn't seen a real color in years. The sight horrifies him, like a reverse nightmare, waking up to find he's alive rather than dead, some weird version of Frankenstein. He's really dying, suffocating in a coffin somewhere beneath the ground.

The wood splinters too easy, the ground too loose. He saw on TV that it was impossible to dig yourself out of a grave because of the lack of oxygen and pressure of feet of earth. This isn't the first time he's proven science wrong. Alastair says science is for men without imagination, and religious ignorance is for the men who don't deserve to exist. Life is what you make of it, how far you can expand your horizons. Man is slave to morality, give up morals and you're free to rule the world.

Sunlight stings his eyes worse than acid; too much light too soon. Four decades of darkness and suddenly he has everything to take in, light and clean air and no sulfur, no sand throbbing with a distant heartbeat. What a world, what a wonderful, familiar, embarrassing world to be in, where men are secretly monsters and monsters are hunted down by men. Alastair isn't waiting for him on the surface, not that he'd recognize him in stolen skin, Alastair's very own Armani meat suit. His grave, it's very clearly his grave, because he's in his own skin, somehow, brought back to serve one of Alastair's hidden purposes, no doubt. That's the kind of thing Alastair lives for. Surprises are the spice of life, the only fun in a mundane routine of blood and screams.

There is a motel two miles down the stretch of sun baked highway. It advertises HI DEF ORN in blinking blue letters, the g, h, and p no longer on the sign. There aren't any hotels in hell, that's for sure, and the porn is always three dimensional, up close, and full Technicolor. He knows his favorite credit card by heart and the front desk, a pot bellied balding man named Gerald tells him so long as the numbers work, he don't need to show no ID. Gerald's a good guy, he's going to hell of course, but he's a good, dishonest guy. He'll fit in well after someone breaks him in a few dozen times.

Sam's cell phone goes straight to voicemail. Bobby's phone rings without anyone picking it up.

"They're both occupied at the moment Dean." There's a man in his hotel room, sitting beside him on the bed, Casablanca trench coat and blue tie.

"Alastair?"

"No." He's torn between disappointment and relief. Alastair means structure, purpose, something he knows; no Alastair is just the gift of unwanted life. He didn't ask for this. He didn't want to leave. He deserved to be where he was.

"Right. Alastair would never wear a tie."

"I'm not a demon." His blue eyes are big, brimming with badly suppressed affection. He thinks he recognizes that look.

"Am I seeing dead people? Is M. Night gonna pop out of the closet? Was I really a werewolf the entire time living in a 19th century village in the middle of modern day America?" Furrowed brow, the guy is definitely not a demon. Demons have a sense of humor.

"No Dean. You don't remember me?" If he could get a good glimpse of his soul he'd know. Souls are easier to pinpoint than bodies. Two people can have relatively similar faces. No two people have the same soul. He once cut up identical twins on the rack, he could always tell them apart, long after the two girls forgot their own names. "I returned you. I pulled you from perdition."

The bright, white light; he remembers. When he closes his eyes he can see the sharpened side of a sword slicing through Alastair's bone, Alastair's blood on the glass floor.

"What are you?" There is a packet of Splenda sweetener on the nightstand, not a grain of salt in sight.

"I'm an angel of the Lord." Alastair always said that these guys were real, even when the other demons said they weren't. You can't believe something that's never been proven, you need to buckle down and prove it wrong. Alastair would bite through his cheeks and sing an old demon fable about an angel come to take an accidentally hell bound soul away but it was too late, because it had turned to evil, the worst of any demon ever known. Demons tell the best stories, there are always happy endings, souls crowned king of darkness, hell rising up to claim real land, rape and pillage and play.

"That's why Alastair didn't try and kill you." Alastair would never let anyone take him away. Alastair would kill him first, Alastair _would_. _I'll rip you to pieces and eat you before I let anyone else have you, I'll put you somewhere to burn_.

"I don't try and understand his motives." The angel, a real, honest to, well, honest to God angel pats him on the shoulder. "I'm just pleased to have you returned safely and without damage. Your soul is intact." His soul is broken beyond repair and somehow an angel can't see that, all the cracks where he's falling apart. The atmosphere here is too heavy, he can't keep himself together, hold his head up high. "I looked for you for quite some time."

There's no real way to respond to that. He can say thank you and he can tell the angel to shove it, but either way he loses, either way he's sitting in a motel room with crappy porn and a supposed angel.

"Why did you decide to give me a second chance?"

"I didn't decide. God did."

"God really has his priorities screwed up. Do you have a name or should I call you angel?"

"My name is Castiel." The name doesn't sound all that angelic. Castiel's pretty ordinary, nothing visually special or unique about him.

"Castiel." He nods once, rubs at the smudges of dirt on the backs of his hands. "What the hell am I supposed to do now?"

"Rejoin your brother of course." Castiel sounds like the answer is self explanatory, the most obvious thing in the world. "Why would you do anything else?" He doesn't want his brother to see him like this, dirt from his grave crumbled in his hair, his skin turned brown and gray from the earth, brittle yellow grass stuck to his pants. "You're going to find him, aren't you?" Castiel tilts his head to the side; so far over it almost touches his shoulder. "Aren't you Dean?"

"If he'd answer his damn phone." He's not going to burden Sam with this, not yet. He needs to sit down and think, consider his options, hope the world hasn't changed in the four months he's been gone, or maybe hope it has. Castiel doesn't look like he believes him. He isn't quite sure he believes himself.

"I'll leave you alone then." Castiel puts a hand on his shoulder, brushes off specks of dirt. "I'll visit again later." He doesn't particularly care to see Castiel again. Castiel's given him something he didn't ask for, something he didn't want anymore. It's like getting that baseball glove you wanted when you were eight when you're twelve and football is all you want to play. Life was his baseball glove, hell made him its second string quarterback.

* * *

He vaguely misses blood. Water is thin and runny, slips right off him, but it makes him clean, has dirt swirling brown around the drain. He's surprised the water isn't red, that the blood can't be washed off his soul; thirty years of his blood and ten of someone else's.

He can't decide between pizza or burgers. He orders both, a meat lover's supreme and double bacon cheeseburger, enough fat to stop his heart.

The splash of holy water to his face is an indication that his food isn't being delivered. The fact that Sam throws it at him makes the proof more pronounced. Sam thinks he's a demon; he isn't so sure he isn't. He used to be one; he doesn't see why he still wouldn't be. Just because he looks pretty again doesn't mean he's pretty on the inside. He doesn't feel the urge to kill and maim, slit throats and tie bows with intestines, but he could, if presented the opportunity.

"Dean." Sam hugs him like he deserves it, like he did before all of this, when he was so, _so_ tiny, too tiny to do more than love Dean unconditionally. Those were the best days of his life.

A sharp stinging in the back of his neck, Sam cut him; of course he cut him, with nothing less than a silver knife. Sam takes precaution, does what he's been taught. "I was sure I'd been dreaming." Sam's huge and warm and sweaty, smells like too many hours on the open road, leather heated over in the sun.

"If you were dreaming wouldn't I be naked?" He's close to naked, a towel half around his waist, his clothes draped over the heater to dry, dripping water from the sink. "How'd you know I was here? I tried to call but your phone was out of service."

"I had the strangest dream last night." Sam won't let him go, places palms flat on his bare back to press him close, touches the line of his spine with his fingertips. "I dreamed an angel told me you were alive again. I didn't believe it, but I had nothing to lose. It's so good to see you Dean."

"Same here Sam." He never thought he'd see Sam again, not until Sam died, if Sam were innately bad like he is. The hug continues, awkwardness itches at his skin. It doesn't feel right to be touched by someone who isn't Alastair or a nameless demon trying to rape and tear him apart. Sam's too gentle. Affection without torture is a foreign concept. "You mind letting go?"

"Sorry." Sam's not sorry, squeezes him tighter and kisses him, right on the mouth, the first kiss he's had that doesn't hurt, doesn't make him bleed, no blood filtering sour between his teeth. He wouldn't exactly call it better. It is nice though, human and nice, not like when he'd kiss random souls in hell for the kicks, rape their mouths with his tongue to scare them. A grown man pleaded with him not to rape him, called him a faggot, shivered and screamed. It pissed him off so much he took his blade and shoved it up inside him, had him ride out the length of it, cut his ass to ribbons. After that it wasn't fun to kiss him, he'd beg for the cock instead, anything but the blade. Dean lost interest real quick. Breaking in a new toy is the fun part, then he's left with pieces and sloppy seconds, traumatized souls. Stockholm Syndrome is boring. A healthy relationship is built out of fear and respect, with a solid foundation of hatred, ending on a summit of understanding, a common drive to succeed, the possibility of betrayal. He'd have gotten the better of Alastair if he'd needed to, if he'd had the chance. Revenge is fair game in foreplay.

Sam's spit is sour with the aftertaste of his lunch, stringy because he hasn't had enough to drink. The flavor is entirely human, very Sam, their tongues sliding together, not a jagged point or rotting skin anywhere. He used to think about this, dream of it, being touched this reverential way, by someone without horns and claws, hooves that brushed his legs at night, twisted beneath the covers sweet of dead and skinned clean babies. He was going to ask Alastair for a blanket of his own, forged from the flesh of something tiny and adorable, or someone terrified and pretty.

Sam's hand drops his towel; it crumples damp around his feet. This is what he wanted for so long, for decades, each time Alastair ran hands up and down his body. His stomach runs cold, heat draining from that low place in his belly, that greedy, aroused place. Alastair has ruined him. He hears Alastair's voice in his head, telling him how much he loves it, how his brother's touch turns him on.

"I missed you." Sam mouths him all over, across his neck, where his pulse races too fast. Alastair won't approve of this. Alastair will make him and Sam pay. Alastair will hang Sam upside down to dry like a slaughtered pig and fuck him face down in a puddle of his brother's blood, drown him in it until he dies for a second time. Alastair will find out, he's sure of it, as sure as he is that Alastair will come for him. Alastair said if anyone took him away he'd drag him back, in fluids and pieces if he had to. Alastair doesn't just say things like that, he follows through. "You have no idea how horrible it's been living without you." He _does_, he does and Sam can never, never know about it. Sam can't see the demons in his head, the demons inside him, the demon he is inside, the thing he used to be. Sam can't see any of him, the lowly soul or the powerful demon, standing tall at his master's side, horns curling from his head and claws growing from his fingers and toes, little spikes rising from each of the vertebrae in his back, tail sharp enough to pierce through eight layers of flesh and solid bone.

"I think I can guess." He'll let himself get swept up in this, in Sam, for just this once. Alastair can have him if he wants him, but he gets some time with Sam first. Sam's kisses start to taste like sulfur. Sam's nails start to feel too sharp, his skin too warm all over, Alastair creeping his way into his head, slithering through the invisible cracks of his soul. It's easy to forget it all but even harder to sit and remember. The sun is yellow and the sky is blue and the motel ceiling is a gross eggshell custard yellow that might have been white when the building was first painted. He tackles Sam to the bed and it gets simple, ritualistic. The buttons on Sam's shirt pop off when he tugs, Sam's pants slide down when he pushes. He wants Sam to like it, wants to make it good, because he knows what can happen, how ugly things can turn. If he couldn't get Alastair to come Alastair tortured him until he did, rutting into open wounds and severed muscle. Alastair liked holes cut into his intercostals muscles best, so he could squeeze between the bones of his ribs.

"Jesus, Dean." He wants Sam to shut his face, shimmies down to suck Sam's cock so he does. ***NC-17 material removed***

He has Sam flat on his back and he keeps him that way, gives Sam what he's been giving for years. ***NC-17 material removed***

Hell has made him great at this. Getting off is an art, a dark and bloody one. There's potential up here, potential hell lacked. Reality makes it more dangerous, provides a better thrill. If he were to put a blade to Sam's thigh and sever his femoral artery he'd bleed out in minutes, ten pints of blood like a fountain and then stop, whereas in hell he could bleed forever, on and on and on, gallons and gallons and gallons, bleeding anew each time he came back. There's no luxury of forever, nothing beyond death except hell. Sam wouldn't do well with someone like Alastair. Alastair is an acquired taste, an open parasitic wound rubbed with salt. He gives as good as he knows how and Sam takes it all. He rides Sam hard enough to shatter his pelvis if he presses with his full body weight, hard enough to hurt. The muscles in Sam's legs visibly tense each time he comes down, bracing against the impact. There are cracks in the ceiling and they form shapes, vague outlines of trees and rainclouds, a San Andreas Fault above his head.

"Goddamn." Sam has strands of hair plastered to his forehead, sweat pooled along his collarbone. "I think you broke something." Sam says it with a hiss, a tentative shift of his legs. Alastair would say it happily; press on the shattered bones in his hips for the pleasure, press until he bled and let Dean lick it from him. Sam kisses Dean's jaw as he rolls off the bed.

"My food's here." Sam pays the delivery person, an overweight teen he can't tell is a boy or a girl.

"Dead for four months and that's the first thing you order." Sam's voice radiates affection. "You haven't changed."

"Yes I have." Pizza can't wash the taste of human flesh and blood from his tongue. The flare of his appetite sputters and dies, nothing but a dimming ash and phantom curl of smoke. "Even a dead man has to change a little right?" He corrects himself because Sam gives him a _look_, one of those soul-searching, "I'm here for you" things, and he isn't ready to talk to Sam, to people in general. Forty years of nothing and there may not be any feelings to share. He doesn't care to look for any either.

"Right." Here it comes, the moment defining question, what anyone who knows him is dying to ask. "What was hell like Dean? Do the books and movies even come close to describing it?" Sam's read about layers of hell in his books, different categories of torture, eternal thirst and blazing fires. Sam can't imagine any of it. No mortal, normal mind can. Hell is the sole knowledge of demons and dead men, an occasional angel thrown in for spice.

"I don't know, maybe, I honestly don't remember being there. I remember dying, Jesus that hurt like a bitch. We're never getting a dog, by the way." He doesn't finish his pizza; the sauce on his fingers red as blood. "But next thing I knew, after getting mauled that is, I woke up six feet under, dug myself out of my own fucking grave. I wish the dudes from Mythbusters could have seen it."

"That's a good thing." Sam touches his shoulders, keeps touching him, his hands everywhere. "It's probably not something you'd want to remember." It isn't something he wants to remember, but he wouldn't get rid of the memories if he could. They're too helpful, show him the concrete proof that he's a monster.

"Dodged a bullet there I suppose. You have anything to drink with you? I could kill for a beer." He's killed for nothing; a reward behind it could be nice.

"There's some whiskey in the bottom of your bag somewhere, I'll go get it."

He hasn't gotten drunk since year thirty-seven, when Alastair showed him how to let blood ferment in the heat, turn to thick sludge nearly impossible to swallow. It wasn't real alcohol but he got drunk off it, off the taste, the rush of bleeding little girls and boys over basins made from their own little skulls. Alastair got him drunk off the power and fucked him there, in the sand where the demon children played, stalked their equally tiny victims, where they learned to become the very worst of men and women. All the kids had looked just like his brother. Alastair had laughed and laughed and the children laughed with him. That was one of the best days.

"Do you really think an angel talked to you in your dreams Sam?" The angel Castiel has the talent to be places he isn't meant to be. Castiel could ruin everything for a second time. Plucked from the fires and he's feeling a greater heat.

"I don't know." Sam watches him swig from the bottle. After experiencing the burn of Alastair's come whiskey goes down easy. "Part of me wants to. Bobby said it was just wishful thinking. Maybe it's a remnant vision from the whole Azazel thing. I don't care why or how it happened, not right now." Sam's smiling at him, adoringly, an expression he hasn't seen in a long time. "It's almost surreal seeing you again." He saw Sam all the time in hell, just a different version of Sam, too many Sams inside his head. Evil Sams and younger Sams and Sams bleeding everywhere, Sams grinning at him while Alastair held his heart in his hand, Sams stroking his hair when he cried. He was never able to get rid of Sam, until finally he was, towards the very, very end, and now Sam is back, and Alastair is the ghost on his shoulder. Alastair is a more influential ghost than Sam was. "You're smooth everywhere." Sam's finally noticed, inhales sharp and peers in close to examine the raw red handprint on his shoulder. Alastair must have given him something to remember by; the shape of Alastair's palm burned into his skin. "How did you get out of hell?"

"No idea. Maybe I bargained my way out, maybe they were sick of me." He should say something about Castiel. He doesn't. If Sam thought there was divine intervention things would only get worse.

"We need to find out. If you didn't do it and I didn't do it, then something else did. From the look of that handprint, it probably isn't something good."

"There have to be more important things to focus on. Let's get back to hunting, we'll figure stuff out along the way." The whiskey crawls like fire down his throat; heats him up inside. "I miss riding around in my baby and shooting evil sons of bitches."

"I was on my way to investigate a possible boogie man in New Mexico."

"We'll leave in the morning."

Sam fucks him when the whiskey is gone, legs hooked on Sam's shoulders to spread him wide and open.

His baby is a hundred times more sleek and pretty than in his memories. Memories aren't fluid, renewable, they can evaporate, they're pictures that wear and tear. They're t-shirts left to bleach in the sun.

"Oh I missed you sweetheart." The metal is sun warmed on his hands, against his cheek.

"Dude, get in before you start humping the car."

"Don't tempt me." He stopped thinking about the Impala thirty years into his stay, when everything suddenly got so important. He almost feels guilty. "I'd treat my girl right."

"You're so disgusting." Sam sounds happier than anyone Dean has spoken to in years.

Driving is like getting back on a bike. It's simple; a task he's done for hours and hours and hours of his lifetime. If he added up all the time he's been alive he thinks half of it would have been spent in the car or behind the wheel. Sam lets him play his music, lets him roll down the windows so he can feel the wind on his face. It's almost perfect. There's something not quite right about it. He smells sulfur mixed in with the leather, blood hanging in the air, so thick he can taste it, the bitter tang of demonic blood, sulfur and iron. _Alastair_. Alastair is coming to get him; Alastair wants to bring him home.

Outside the window the trees aren't naked. They have leaves in different shades of green, different stages of growth. Flowers bloom out here in the sunlight. There are no flowers in the dark. These trees don't grab a man either, aren't laced with layers of thorns. Nonthreatening, that's what the real world is. The ordinary is ordinary, no pain attached. The metal of the car isn't burning hot, won't brand and boil his skin if he touches it, the birds aren't going to peck out his eyes and swallow them, regurgitate them later for their featherless, pink young. He's expecting attacks that aren't going to come. It's a brand new world for an old Dean. He hopes he can adjust. He knows what it feels like to be a con after a long stint in prison. Life goes on and changes, doesn't slow down and wait for you to catch up. Four months is forty years, inside he's seventy, his soul older than most.

"A boogie man you said?" He spreads out the clippings from the newspaper. He hasn't had to read a single word in decades. There was nothing to read in hell, no one bothered to stop and write; words were trivial. Words outlived a soul, only there was never anyone left to read them. Letters turned to dust in the wind, soaked by blood spatter. "What kind of creature do we call the boogie man?"

"I think it's a demon or a witch. We'll have to get some info from an eyewitness. The little sister of the third victim hid on the top bunk bed during the attack, she probably saw something."

He didn't miss suits in hell. Ties are still evil. He bets if Alastair had to pick a meat suit he'd pick one wearing a tie and maybe some braces.

The little girl is six, cute as a button, with the biggest brown eyes, dark hair done in two neat little braids that hang down her back. On the rack she was just his type. He had a little girl like her once. To torture her he cut off her pony tails first, just to make sure she was crying before he started. Alastair let him keep those pony tails on the mantle, the pretty bundles of brown hair tied off with pink ribbons. He can't look the little girl in the eyes at first, watches her pink sandaled feet swing underneath the table.

"Vera, I know you already talked to the other police officers, but my partner and I have a few questions for you." Sam smiles gentle in the trusting way demons know to mimic. Dean used it himself to lure children off with him. His little girl walked right into his arms and he carried her away to carve her up, share her with Alastair. "You have to promise you're going to be honest with us, okay?"

"Okay." Vera has hands a fifth the size of his, with flecks of pink nail polish on her fingers. She's wearing a pink and white flowered sundress; too precious for words. He can't do this.

"You told the police that you were hiding under your covers so you didn't see who attacked your brother. Are you sure you didn't see anything? Did you maybe smell something bad or get really cold all of a sudden?" Sam can do it without him; he'll come back when there's something to kill.

"No." She clutches her one-eared stuffed rabbit tighter.

"Vera" He reaches out to touch one tiny hand and he wants to cry it makes him hurt so much inside. Little girls just like this. He killed babies just like this and he didn't care, could do it again if he were told to. "Are you positive you didn't see what he looked like? Because I think you might have peeked out from under your blankets real quick." Vera plays with the ring on his finger, twists is back and forth.

"It's not a him." She whispers, clutching his ring like it will save her, gripping the rest of his hand too tight. "I tried to tell the other policeman but he said it wasn't real. It is real though. I saw it."

"Saw what?" He takes off his ring and gives it to her, watches her try it on.

"It's the cucúy." Vera starts to cry, round tears that trail the length of her face, roll over the plumpness of her cheeks onto the table where they splatter. "Mamá told Luís if he didn't go to bed when he was supposed to the cucúy would eat him. She _told_ him. I told the policeman it was the cucúy and he said the cucúy is just a story. It's not a story." She sobs harder, into the fuzzy, well loved stomach of her bunny.

"We believe you Vera." Sam pats the top of her head awkwardly. Sam doesn't know how to handle children. He's never had the practice.

"In fact, we're gonna come back tonight and kill it for you." He wipes her tears with this thumbs, fights the buried down deep urge to lick them, taste the salt and her misery. "But we're going to need your help. Do you know how to kill a cucúy?"

"No. Mamá says the only way to stay safe is to go to bed when you're supposed to."

"Alright. Here's what we're gonna do. Sam and I are going to come back tonight, you open your window for us and we'll hide and wait for it to show up. All you have to do is stay up past your bedtime."

"Will it eat me?"

He glances down at the crime scene photos, a boy's bed soaked dark with blood, organs and flesh chewed away to the bone, the bloody pulp of a skeleton, work worthy of Alastair.

"I promise it isn't going to eat you."

Sam drives them to a motel because his flask is still half full like he left it. Four month old liquor burns the same as the fresh stuff. He's staring the sweetest kind of temptation in the face. He has no desire and yet inside he yearns. He would never hurt her here but anywhere else he would, any other realm of reality.

"How much firepower do you think we're going to need?" Sam packs up guns and rock salt, enough lighter fluid to power their blow torches and burn every corpse in a ten mile radius, a silver knife long enough to pierce through any heart.

"I don't even know what a cucúy is, fucked if I know." His flask runs dry, one last drop for his tongue.

"I think I'll call Bobby then, see what he knows." Sam opens the motel door.

"Why are you going outside to call Bobby?" Sam must want to talk about him.

"I'm not getting good service; I'll be back in a few minutes." He takes out his phone; he has three and a half bars. Sam definitely wants to talk about him.

Sam is on the phone for twenty eight minutes, talking so low Dean can't hear him through the door.

"Bobby has no idea, he said shooting it and torching it is as good of a shot as any."

Sam's probably lying. He's too busy thinking about severed braids and children's screams to care, his head spinning in torment or perhaps lament for his current situation.

"Vera said she goes to bed at eight, we only have an hour."

They fuck, maybe in case one or both of them dies tonight, maybe because this is the new routine, a pre-hunt fuck and a post-hunt beer. Sam has a reason for it however, one he doesn't share, slides warm against his back and fucks him until his face is so deep into a pillow he might suffocate.

"There's a bar about a mile down the road, when we finish the hunt, I'm buying you bar food. As much as you want." Sam's making something up to him. This isn't "I'm happy you're alive" generosity anymore. He'll have to check the car for scratches in the morning, make sure Sam hasn't broken his favorite gun.

"Thanks. I'm dying for some hot wings."

He drives this time. Vera has her bedroom window open and waiting for them as soon as he turns off the car. She's standing on her tiptoes in a purple Barbie nightgown, straining to see over the sill, her hair out of its braids, hanging loose down past her waist.

"My parents are awake, you gotta be quiet."

He and Sam have to fit into a closet barely made to be big enough for the clothes and dolls of a little girl. They sit side to side, hips, knees, and shoulders touching, watching the window through a hole drilled into the wall. Vera sings softly to herself in bed, sounding so afraid her voice quavers.

A cucúy looks like demon bitches he saw in hell. It has gray withered skin stretched over its bones, limbs skeleton thin, sharpened black nails on its fingers. Alastair had longer claws than it, sharper ones too. It does have one thing all demons lacked. It has hair, long, stringy black hair down to its naked waist, blood and mucous laced drool dripping from the corners of its mouth, its feet human but with claws. It has eyes redder than a freshly made wound.

"Jesus Christ." Sam sucks in a mouthful of air, cocks his gun.

The thing screeches when they shoot it, hands outstretched for Vera. It bleeds gooey black; sludge oozing from the bullet wounds in his neck, even as it keeps going, sprinting across the floor. It leaves black smears on the pale blue carpet.

Vera screams. He tackles it to the ground, presses his gun to its jaw and pulls the trigger over and over. Its jaw is blown away completely, broken bones cracking off, hanging by thin threads of skin. It does manage to swipe him in the face with its claws, cut three gashes in his cheeks. He goes down bleeding; Sam kicks it in the side to roll it off him. Sam lights his torch and the cucúy goes up in flames, shrieking inhuman, hair singing where it hangs, burning just like Bela. The blowtorch is no lake of fire but it'll do the job just fine. The smoke alarm outside the room starts to beep.

"Shit, let's get out of here." A little hand waves to them from the window as they drive off.

"Did you see that thing Dean?" Sam laughs, drums his hands reflexively across the dashboard. "It might have been the ugliest thing we've killed since that wendigo in Colorado."

Bela was the ugliest thing he's killed. Alastair is the ugliest thing he's seen in his lifetime.

"That wendigo, no question."

* * *

The Winchesters don't interact quite as Castiel had anticipated.

Dean is distant and withdrawn, while his body language suggests he is entirely open. It is characteristically Dean, he knows, to suppress himself beyond reason. Dean is the antithesis of a mirror. Something ugly and broken gazes in but the reflection returned is whole and beautiful. Dean's soul is a two-way mirror. The real side gazes in and the imitation can see nothing but itself. Castiel is the only one capable of recognizing Dean for who he truly is. He remade Dean's physiognomy to be flawless; now he is concerned for the state of his soul, the cracks that have not mended, merely widened. Canyons cut through Dean where he is still tenderly vulnerable.

"I'll have a large order of your buffalo wings, extra spicy, and blue cheese dressing." Dean speaks without gusto, nurses the last few swallows from a near empty bottle of beer. Dean hates blue cheese dressing, he has since he was seventeen and some friends bet him fifty bucks he couldn't eat six helpings of it in a row. Dean won the bet, used the money to buy Sam new shoes for school, junk food for himself, and spent the night vomiting in the bathroom, Sam pacing right outside the door.

"Just another beer, thanks." Castiel understands little of Sam's behavior, but he can sense his happiness at his brother's return. Sam has Dean back; they are Dean and Sam again, as they have been for twenty-six years. Normalcy has been restored to two men who have embraced the abnormal, who were forced to make due. He is afraid the damage to their relationship may be irreversible. Dean has been gone far longer than Sam. Dean mourned and forgot. Dean moved on. Dean fell prey to Alastair's licentious personality, his salacious offerings. Dean gave into what he perceived as the darkness he harbored within his soul. Dean became the monster he assumed himself to be. Castiel is here to tell him he is not a monster, that he was corrupted by the hands of hell. Adam and Eve were tossed from the Garden of Eden with the taste of apples on their tongues. Dean was pulled from the depths of hell with blood in his mouth and on his soul. He will recover. He will because Castiel is here to help him, and Sam will help him too. Dean is at his best for his brother. Dean makes himself his best for Sam. He has since he was thrust into his role of caregiver, provider, mother-father-brother-lover, teacher of all the world has to offer.

Dean starts his fourth beer of the night by the time his appetizer arrives. Castiel knows how beer tastes, the sourness of it, the stale rum of saliva it leaves in Dean's mouth.

"This is just like it used to be." Sam grins at Dean, eyeing the long swig of beer Dean takes. There are lies hidden in the hollows of Sam's dimples. If Castiel sees it then Dean does as well. He knows Sam because Dean knows Sam.

"Man" Dean holds a wing in his fingers but does not bite into it, lets the orange-red sauce slide greasily down his skin. "We need to start having more fun together." Dean dips the chicken into the dressing, mixes white over the orange-red and still does not eat. "Tell me what you've been up to while I was gone Sam." Dean bites and orange stains his lips. Buffalo wing sauce stings on skin; Castiel has experienced it secondhand through Dean. Dean doesn't lick the sauce away.

"Hunting, just like you wanted me to." Sam never does anything Dean wants him to; it is a motif of the Winchester childhood. Dean asks Sam to go right and Sam goes left, and Dean lets him because he loves him, forgives him for the hurt. Dean would forgive Sam anything.

"You didn't try to go after Lilith or do anything as equally stupid?" Dean's lips are all orange.

"No." Sam takes Dean's celery stick, crunches into it. "I hunted, I got by, I didn't sell my soul." If Sam had sold his soul it would have been easier. Dean would have been brought back sooner; Dean would be a Dean without the marks of Alastair imprinted deep into his bones, Alastair burned on his soul like a brand. "I made you a promise."

"Thank you Sam." Dean waves at the waitress for another beer. _Oh Dean_. Alcohol is no substitute, alcohol can't fill the holes. Dean needs the Lord's shining guidance. Dean needs to know more of his purpose. Dean needs to be someone's soldier in life; he functions as one, an obedient unit, subservient to the demands of a select few. John Winchester engrained this trait into Dean, through years of orders, taught Dean that you belong to the man who makes you, who gives you the one thing you want. Alastair remade Dean in hell, Alastair is nothing but rewards, rewards warped by conditions, the standards of a Winchester, the casual hatred and occasional affection that fuels Dean. Alastair won Dean, stole the role of his father. Alastair let him off, held him up, took him down, made him an equal, made Dean believe he was his, a chattel to be purchased and a soul to be owned. Dean has always been God's, but Castiel must convince him that he is not Alastair's.

Sam's phone buzzing on the table cuts the silence. Dean licks his sauce covered fingers; Sam brings the phone to his ear.

"I'm gonna take this outside, it's too loud in here. I'll be back in a minute."

"It's fine, I have to take a leak." Dean wipes his face with a napkin, smudges the white with a pale orange combination of buffalo sauce and dressing. Wings make Dean think of bottles of vinegar, something sterile, eating hospital food with stitches in his arm, a jagged red line down the length of his father's chest, covered by a thin layer of gauze, Sam eating Dean's pudding cup in the corner; unharmed.

Dean is wrong inside; Castiel must speak with Sam.

Outside Sam whispers into the cell receiver, one hand over his left ear to hear better, the other curled like a C around the phone. Two bursts, one of exasperation, accompanied by a weary slump of the shoulders, the second harsh agreement, a too angry flipping shut of the phone.

"Sam." Sam flinches, spins on his heel, right hand out.

"You." Sam lowers the hand, drops it loosely to his side. Sam shows awe for angels of the Lord, even smiles, offers his right hand again, this time in introduction. "I thought I'd been imagining you."

He shakes Sam's hand. It feels like it did in Dean's memories.

"I'm no figment of your imagination. My name is Castiel, I'm an—"

"Angel, yeah, you told me, it's just, wow." Sam scratches his head. "I mean, you spend basically your entire life believing in god and angels, but you never think you're going to meet one until you die." Sam's eyes widen. "I'm not dead right?"

"We are not in heaven. It is" – a rat scurries through the alley with the carcass of a smaller rat in its mouth - "much nicer than this."

"Not to be rude, but why are you here?"

"Your brother didn't tell you." It's not a surprise. Honesty is not a word in Dean's vocabulary. Dean was raised on truth about the world, so naturally he fed lies to Sam, spewed lies to everyone. Dishonesty is Dean's gift to the world, knowledge his burden.

"What didn't Dean tell me? I want to thank you, by the way, for telling me where he was. It would have taken him days to find me otherwise, if he ever did."

"I didn't just inform you of Dean's rejuvenated status. I brought him back; I rescued his soul from hell. He knows that, I spoke with him about it. Dean remembers that day." Sam's face falls, forehead wrinkling in anger, a hint of worry and hurt in his temples.

"He told me he had no idea how he got back. He said he doesn't remember anything about hell." It doesn't feel right to tell Sam the truth. Dean's experiences are private horrors; to share them would be to betray the intimacy he finds with Dean's soul. "Is he lying to me?"

"I don't know." A lone cockroach walks on five legs, stops to touch its antennae to Sam's shoes. "You should understand that Dean has been through unimaginable things." Castiel himself would not fully be able to contemplate them had he not witnessed the scenes himself, watched every atrocity as he flew Dean to the surface to begin again. "Hell is the place where everything that makes a man human goes to die. Hell is debilitating, it is like a depression. The body can persevere but it is the mind that truly suffers. Man can tolerate pain, torture is physical and emotional." He cannot find an accurate description of Dean's time in hell. Sam can't fathom a creature such as Alastair. Sam has met Azazel and Lilith in the flesh, where they are limited, on earth where their actions are measured and dictated by reality. Tearing apart a body involves concrete amounts of blood and bone, certain muscles, various tubes and organs. Lilith snaps necks and dismembers bodies in the form of a charming little girl. Sam hasn't seen a demon in its element, the wild burning of their eyes in the red light of hell, the shine of their black and gray flesh when it is smeared in blood, their grim, horrific appearances. "Hell makes you a different man. Dean may or may not remember. I wouldn't blame him for wanting to forget or for wanting you to think he forgot."

"He can talk to me about stuff like that." Sam looks uncertain, like perhaps he isn't sure he wants to hear what Dean could have to say. "I've seen things that are pretty bad. He's my brother."

"We could talk with him together, if you'd like." Sam has a vague air of sulfur around him, the faintest hint of it on his breath. That can be addressed later, that is something for Dean to handle himself.

Sam leads him to the door.

* * *

He's puking his guts out before he has both feet in the bathroom, wedges his shoulder through the door and rushes to the sink. What he gags up is mostly beer and undigested buffalo wings, all a vibrant orange color, like vomiting Cheetos and orange soda. He ruins the sink through, his sick clogging the drain, filling the bathroom with its smell, bile and food mixing with piss and sweat. If porcelain could talk it would scream at him.

"Whoa, had too much to drink there buddy?" A big guy, tall as Sam maybe; burly, neck thicker than one of Dean's arms, his arms huge and tattooed, an almost beer gut just starting to bulge over the front of his jeans, puts a hand on his shoulder.

"Yeah, I'm fine." He rinses his mouth to get rid of the bitter, slashes water between his lips with his hands.

"No you're not." He doesn't need a good fucking Samaritan tonight. He never got one before, this shouldn't be any different. "You can't be fine Dean, not when we both know you'd rather be back in the pit." The guy's eyes blink to white.

"Alastair?" He should be afraid, he is afraid, his stomach curls in on himself, but there is nothing in the world that could get him to move.

"Guess again." No, Alastair wouldn't pick a body as obvious; he'd want something subtler, like a dentist, a respectable guy paid to cause pain and discomfort, a proctologist maybe.

There's only one other demon with white eyes that he's heard of.

"I thought you liked to wear little girls Lilith."

"Little girls don't get into bars. Plus I wanted to pick a body you'd like, one Alastair would approve of. It's good isn't it?" Lilith flexes the man's huge biceps. The muscles ripple visibly beneath the inked skin.

"It's very huge. You're here to kill me again." It's not a question, not even a statement really, it's almost a relief. He doesn't have to keep waiting for it to happen. Lilith is here, he'll fight or he won't fight, but she's here and when dealing with Lilith the record stands at 1-0. He doesn't stand a chance. "I figured Alastair would come himself."

"He wanted to, believe me." Lilith touches his face with a giant sweaty palm. "I told him he had to stay and man the fort. He can't leave hell when I'm gone without putting someone in charge. I'm afraid you were the only one with the qualifications to run the joint in his absence." He was important in hell, he mattered. He had something to do, a cause to fit into. "You do want to go back, don't you? I can't see why you'd want to stay. This can't feel right to you."

A blond guy, twenty pounds too chubby and kind of short walks in, hands in his pockets.

"Good to see you Dean." Black eyes this time; someone lower ranking, but where there is a master there's bound to be a bitch.

"Ruby, you bitch."

"You were a lot nicer to me before Dean, but, who wouldn't be nice to sweet little Vera? I was forty-nine pounds of adorable, and I know you noticed. I have to say, I thought you were going to jump me right there while you and Sam were questioning me; rip out my eyes and make me eat them. Alastair told us just the type you like, pretty, pretty little girls."

"I thought you and Lilith broke up." Ruby snorts and Lilith seizes her host's face between her body's fat hands and kisses it, thrusts tongue into Ruby's mouth. It's disgusting, to watch two middle aged ugly guys go at it, like a slow motion train wreck of really low budget porn. He will never un-see it.

"You of all people should know it's impossible to betray your master." The two suck face again, grotesquely, more wet then he wanted to see, trading enough saliva to drown a horse. Lilith is the aggressor, tugs Ruby's hair to make her body stay still, bite her lips to draw blood and suck greedily at it. He should slip away while they're distracted; his feet are frozen to the spot.

"I think I'm going to throw up again." They laugh and they're both on him, right up in his face.

"Alastair sent us for you. I think he's lonely down there in hell by himself Dean." Ruby giggles, the sound is unnatural coming from such a pudgy little man. "I think he misses that sweet ass of yours. I bet you give real good, don't you? Put out like a two dollar whore."

"How would you like us to kill you? Alastair said to be sure to ask."

"I don't want you to kill me." He doesn't think he wants to die again. He's here, with Sam, where he can eat and drink and breathe again. He isn't sure he wants to leave yet.

"Oh of course you do silly." Lilith pinches his cheek hard enough for her body's nails to cut a bit of his skin. "Why would you want to stay? You're not the same Dean. You know you can't just march out of here, go out and eat your chicken wings with your brother, drive around and hunt monsters forever. You don't know how to live here anymore. You're someone else now. Dean is dead." She's right, to a degree, this isn't his world anymore, it's Sam's. He's too tired to try and belong in it, to buckle down and adjust and assimilate anew. He learned rules for hell and forgot earth. He wants life to be simple; blood and screams and sifting sand.

"Kill me however you want, as long as it isn't quick."

"That's Alastair's good boy." Lilith strokes his face, so loving and reverential, like a mother would, kisses the blood from the cut on his chin. "You'll be home soon Dean."

"We'll make it look normal, for Sam." Ruby smiles, then slams a knee into his gut.

Lilith pounds him square in the chest. He hears the cartilage at the ends of his ribs crack, the bones crunch on impact. He cries out, because it hurts too much to bear, and this is one part of hell he doesn't miss. He cracks his head on the counter on the way to the floor, blood immediately pouring from the gash in his forehead, salty and slippery everywhere. They stamp him once he's down; Lilith wipes blood from her body's mouth, Ruby rolls him over onto his stomach and takes his wallet from his back pocket. This makes it look normal, this was normal to him, it hurts to die but he gets to go back, smiles around the blood in-between his teeth as Lilith stomps on him again, breaking him up out of procedure, because it's the standard, demon thing to do, fuck him up now and bleed him out before they fill him up with sulfur on his way in.

"Dean!" He didn't want Sam to see, never, not for Sam to see, the front of his shirt bathed in blood and chest caved in like a reverse volcano. Ruby and Lilith shove Sam into the mirror and leave, their damage done, Sam's blood sliding down the fractured glass in thin oozes; make a spider web of red. _Sammy_. He tries to get to Sam, kiss his cuts better like when Sam was little, but all he can do is turn over and let the blood pooling in his mouth dribble out, stringy with saliva.

He always thought it would end like this, him and Sam together. Castiel standing to his left is an unwelcome surprise. _Don't heal me you fucker__._ He wants to go. Castiel and Sam kneel by him, Sam's hands shaking. Castiel has a mournful, angelic woe in his eyes.

_Life is so long_

"For thine is the kingdom." Castiel prays, cradling his face between the palms of his hands, stroking the broken, shattered bones with his fingertips; his skin is soft and blood slick.

_This is the_

"Dean." Sam chokes on a mixture of his own blood, the gash above his right eyebrow leaking, dripping down onto his face. One drop lands on his eyelash, resting there, a glistening crimson droplet shimmering in the dull buzz of florescent light. _It's raining blood_.

This is the way the world ends, with the erratic, slowing beating of his goddamn heart, his shaky, shallow breathes, the hiss of air escaping from his punctured lungs.

"For thine is.."

_This_

In hell, Alastair clasps his hand and pulls him off the rack.

_Welcome back Deano__._

He smiles, Alastair's tongue wriggling its way in past his teeth.

* * *

"Dean, oh God, Dean please." Sam seizes Dean's face in his hands, smears blood across his brother's cheekbones. Dean's skin is streaked a wet, vibrant red. There is no dignity in this death, this death that is Dean Winchester's second. Twice now Dean has been given the opportunity at life and twice he has discarded it, relinquished his mortal soul to evil. Man is more ungrateful than Castiel can understand. "Don't die you fucker, not again." Sam grips handfuls of Dean's shirt and shakes him, but Dean lolls unresponsive. Dean is a dead thing. His body is vacated, soulless and cooling on the pale gray and white linoleum. "Castiel." Sam's eyes are watery, a thin trail of mucous leaking from his nose that he sucks back in with a sniffle, throat straining in an effort not to cry. "Fix him." Sam lets go of Dean's shirt and his body falls back with a thud.

"I can restore him physically, but that will be useless without his soul." He has no qualms or lingering strands of uncertainty woven into a web of disillusionment. Dean is in hell. His soul earned no redemption in its brief moments of new life, it obtained no fresh salvation. "I'll have to go and retrieve it."

"What do I do until then?" Sam wipes his eyes with the back of his wrist. They're no longer watering, but the edges are tinged red and shiny. "How long will you be?"

"I'm not sure." He touches a hand to Dean's chest, where his blood has soaked the front of his shirt crusty and cold. Dean is dead, for the first time Castiel feels as though he has failed. He's let Dean down. "For now, you should bury him."

He will go to hell to find Dean a thousand times over.

His second journey to hell is one he makes alone without the burden of uncertainty on his shoulders, contemplation of the unknown. He knows exactly what lies ahead, down through the crackles of blood stained lightning, the abundance of living sand, pulsing with its alien heartbeat. Miles and miles down, where footprints are swallowed by the sand and the damned weave their way across the landscape with the cover of night; Dean resides with Alastair, in a palace made from thousands of bones.

The demons leave him be, scutter back into the darkness like cockroaches to a refrigerator once the kitchen light is turned on. There is no resistance, Alastair sends no armies, there is only the empty desert, the scent of blood wafting from the river, red-black blood dotted with the occasional slip of pale bloated skin. When he sweeps low, low enough to see his reflection on the surface of the river, the bodies reach for him, hands swollen to three times their normal size, the skin cracked and splitting along the lines in the palm, nails water logged and flaking.

It takes him only three weeks to reach his destination. There are no questions to ask his brothers, no demons to kill on the blade of his sword, no unsuccessful wandering. Hell is a familiar world now. He knows every nook and cranny, where the blood drips and boils fresh, smells so strong of salt and iron it burns the inside of Dean's nose. He thinks of Dean and Alastair together; fucking wild behind those bone walls, Alastair's claws scraping skin and muscle from Dean's hips where he holds them steady, drives into Dean so hard he bleeds, and he feels sickened, ill down to the center of his very soul. Dean doesn't belong here with Alastair, he isn't sure if Dean belongs on earth with Sam. Dean deserves something better, far beyond what hell and the mortal world can offer. He can offer Dean that; he can offer Dean almost anything, all the peace and comfort he could want.

Dean and Alastair aren't fornicating this time, as Castiel presses his face close to the glass of the window, rests his forehead against it, strains to see inside. The candles sizzle with the musky rich scent of burning human fat, wicks twisted elegant in gnarls, burning a faint orange light. Castiel's light is brightest and he can see where Dean lays on his side, stretched out and peaceful, one arm and leg dangling over the edge of the bed, the mattress and comforter that smell of death. Dean is remarkably pure physically; his skin retains its coloring, only beginning to roughen at its surface, still no incipient horns at the sides of his head. Dean is still his and God's and Sam's and beautiful.

"I knew you'd show up again Castiel." Dean has slipped from his place in bed while Castiel was lost in thought. "Alastair said you'd be back."

Dean believes every word to slither from Alastair's mouth, roll off his forked, demonic tongue. This kind of blind faith is dangerous. This is no faith in a God who will provide for him. Alastair wants Dean here because Dean is a threat to him. Dean can save the world if he's liberated, Dean can bring Alastair and his kind to their knees, cleanse the underworld fully of their sulfur stink, wipe them clean from the slate of time. Demons will be little more than a phantom memory, a distant story mothers tell to their children before bedtime, as real as the tooth fairy.

"I came for you. I'll always come for you." Alastair himself wouldn't come for Dean, Alastair left him above hell to rot on his own insecurities, the venom of longing. "Let me take you home. Your brother misses you." _Let me save you Dean_.

"I don't want to go." He doesn't have the strength to take Dean by force yet and he doesn't dare attempt. Alastair is sleeping only meters away, the muscles in his back tensing as he inhales. "You shouldn't have wasted your time."

He and Dean walk, leaving footprints side by side in the eternal sand, cemented into the glass sharp grains forever, and forever is easily blown away with a shift of the sulfur winds. Dean leads him to the mouth of the river, where blood rains from gutted, bleeding bodies. This world is nowhere he wants Dean to be. Dean's eternity should be spent elsewhere.

"I can't leave you here Dean. You're important." Dean is the most important man of the century, of the centuries before it, every and any century before the messiah's birth. He thinks Dean would be this important even if he were not the savior of the world.

Dean snorts; it is an ugly, ugly noise.

"Right, the world is going to miss me. Every single person up there is gonna miss Dean fucking Winchester, the man dumb enough to damn his soul to hell twice; the guy who's worth less than the toilet paper he used to wipe his own ass. I'm nothing." Dean's self-loathing is incomprehensible; Dean is the greatest man Castiel has known and will ever know. Dean is not a soldier who can be readily sacrificed. God and John Winchester do not think the same.

"Does Alastair tell you that?"

"You're the mind reader, you already know the answer."

Dean drops to the ground, folds his legs crisscrossed, in the style of a kindergarten classroom, the position of crisscross apple sauce, as Dean's memories recall it. He pats the sand in front of him, beckons for Castiel to join him.

"Please return with me Dean." _Please_.

"You don't understand." He understands Dean better than anyone. "Nothing makes sense up there. I don't feel comfortable in my skin. I think I'd hurt people if I were there long enough. Sure I could function, I could go through the motions, I could hunt and fuck and eat, but I'd give into it one day, and Sam would never forgive me. You'd have to put me down before I could do it again. I don't want Sam to have to kill me or watch me die again." Dean here is not this considerate; Castiel can sense the lies on Dean's tongue, the buzz of them like insects in the humid heat. The river beside them gurgles with its dead life, bubbling sluggishly, almost sweet with its scent of perpetual decay.

A shiny hand emerges from the water and grips at the bank before it slides out of sight. Dean spreads fresh sand over the finger marks dug into the embankment, where the soul scrabbled to keep hold. Castiel remembers the words of his brother Uriel, that the creatures will sense his goodness and drag him into the blood for eternity to wallow in its depths.

"Dean." Dean ducks away from the hand on his shoulder, relaxes into the one on his cheek. Perhaps he should allow Dean to remain here, where he can breathe easy, choked by sulfur and blood, at home living among the sand and soulless. "I'm afraid you don't have a choice in the matter. Heaven needs you." He thinks he might need Dean too; need Dean in indiscernible ways, more than God or the world needs him.

"I'm not sorry you know." Dean places a hand over Castiel's; his nails are just starting to sharpen to claws. He wants to ask Dean what he isn't sorry for, what deplorable act he feels not a paucity of compunction for. "You're not taking me anywhere." One firm kick and Dean sends him back, falling and rolling, tumbling over the river bank and into the blood. _Dean_.

Bloated hands grab him, drag him down, bodies swarming him, plastering to him like leeches. As he sinks, he watches Dean's face at the surface, the soft look of guilt replaced with gleaming pleasure, mouth twisted in a smirk, tiny fangs growing from the tips of his teeth. Dean is not sorry; Dean can no longer feel remorse. Dean is not Dean here in hell, he is corruptible, he is a gem whittled and polished for Alastair's ring finger. Dean is Alastair's beautiful and loyal chattel.

All that Castiel can taste is blood thick on his tongue, coating his throat, clogging his senses. In the river his vision is murky red with limited visibility. He cannot see a hand more than ten centimeters from his face, cannot see the new souls that come for him, latch on and touch him with their slimy skin, rub his being with reverence, as though they are tasting his purity through their flesh. He does not blame them for their attraction to the light of his soul; driven to him as moths are to flames, but he does grow to resent them, loathe them, hatred a tight coil in his abdomen, hatred for hell and the world and his father, for this sacrifice of a destiny.

He sinks with the souls for what feels like an eternity. They bind to him as hemoglobin does to oxygen and gradually begin to drift away, detaching as they go, one by one in slow succession, until he regains his mobility, swims free and unrestricted through the viscous blood. When his hands reach solid ground, the blood on his fingers coats instantly with sand, the spaces between his fingers turning gritty, drawing blood where the sand nestles and digs in, embedded in the webbing, sharper than slivers of glass. He finds the individual shards of sand, picks them out, and flicks them away.

"Hey Cas." Dean is standing on the shore, all scales and wrinkles, as dark as Alastair, stroking the hardened shaft of his cock, brushes his thumb over newly acquired bristles. "Long time no see." There is a young woman kneeling in front of Dean, her arms red up past her elbows, blood smeared in the corners of her mouth. "I'll be with you in a second." The girl smiles at Dean through her blood matted hair, crusted so filthy Castiel can't determine the color. Her breasts gleam bright with blood in the near void of light. "This isn't going to hurt one bit sweetheart, sadly, then you can head on out to the rack." Dean urinates on her, washes clean streaks over her skin, fills the air with the sharp scent of ammonia and sulfur. Dean showers her clean with his urine and her hair beneath the grime is burned out black, blacker than the shadows in the distance, the shapes of mountains and valleys. He watches the primal scene, the brutal and animalistic ritual of hell, an initiation into the demonic lifestyle. There is a bloom of something in his chest, something new rushing with his blood, destructive acid that feels as though it is burning him from the inside out. He feels but he doesn't know what he feels or how to analyze it. Inside he is a mess of emotional conflictions tangled together. He does know one thing; however, as he watches Dean's urine soak dark into the bloody sand.

Human necks break with facility in hell. Castiel simply grasps the girl's head on both sides and twists, the vertebrae crunching audibly. His hands are wet with Dean's urine and his tongue stained with the phantom taste of blood. She lies motionless on the ground and his hand plunges easily into her chest, through the cartilage and bone of her sternum. Her heart is warm to the touch, spurts blood when he squeezes. He offers it to Dean, the lifeless muscle bleeding in his palm. Dean takes the heart and tosses it, throws it out into the dark. There are growls and whines as forgotten souls fight over it.

"You're supposed to say thank you for the gift." His voice has changed, the sound muffled by dried blood in his throat. He does not care for the taste in his mouth, the stickiness of blood and urine over his body. He is not quite certain he likes any of this. He is not sure how he feels within his new skin.

His nails are curved to points that he fastens into the skin on Dean's jaw, jerks Dean forward with all his strength. His fingers rip solidly through Dean's chin, scratching through to the bone. Dean's mouth is sweet of blood as he kisses him, sour with the taste of Alastair, Alastair's claim set firm in Dean's mouth, across his entire body.

Dean spits blood and turns to watch Alastair's silhouette approach. Alastair walks heavy with the burden of his power, the unmistakable gait of an invulnerable leader. Alastair is God here. Alastair is hell's leader in Lilith's absence. Alastair says the words that come into law, rules this black territory with an iron fist. Alastair is a tangible God. Alastair is the father Dean knows, the father he can touch. There is no blind faith in hell. Hell is concrete proof and a liberal yet fascist dictatorship. Alastair cares nothing about what the demons do unless they disobey him directly. Dean finds these aspects of Alastair appealing; this Dean chooses to be on the winning side.

"There you are Deano." Alastair kisses Dean, licks the blood that lingers on Dean's lips, holds Dean by the ears and stares at Castiel as he shoves his tongue deep into Dean's mouth and throat, stabbing him full of it. Now Castiel does burn, his skin crawling. "Been looking for you all over. What're you doing with him?" Alastair wipes his mouth with his fingers, as though he notices the flavor of Castiel in Dean's saliva.

"Nothing." Dean flexes the fledgling wings protruding from his shoulder blades, the tips of the spines on his back moving in the dry wind. "He's nothing, I was just saying hello." Dean doesn't give him the courtesy of a second glance, rubs the base of his hand along the healing gashes in his jaw.

"Ready to go?" Dean's home is with Alastair because Dean has not received a better offer.

"Dean's going to go with me." He says, only two thirds the size of Alastair, the top of his head no higher than the base of Alastair's chin. He is scrawny and pale compared to Alastair.

Dean and Alastair both laugh, doubled over in their laughter, howling with the ferocity of wolves.

"You're fucking hilarious Cas." Dean says while Alastair slings an arm around his shoulders, slides his other hand down to tug roughly on Dean's tail. "Like I'd go anywhere with you."

"You're trying out for the major leagues, rookie. You're gonna have to do better than that."

He has gone this far, he has shed blood in Dean's name, sliced through sulfur skulls for Dean's freedom. He can do this as well. He will overthrow Alastair, and one day hell will tremble at his might and Dean will come to him, stand obedient and grateful and loving at his side.

Castiel is reminded of the line from an old poem as he watches Dean and Alastair disappear.

_Between the essence and the descent falls the shadow_.

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**Please review if you read. I'd like to hear your thoughts, complaints, praises, horrified emoticons, all of it.**


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